Stan Moody

POB 240 Manchester, ME 04351 207/626-0594 Stanmoody1@aol.com

Maine DOC: A Culture of Fear

An MSEA officer once jokingly said to me during my sojourn as a chaplain at Maine State Prison, You dont have to be a rocket scientist to work here! Having been something of a rocket scientist early in my career, I took that comment to heart as I contemplated my exit. Former Department of Corrections (DOC) Commissioner, Marty Magnusson, later asked me what I meant by the DOC being a culture of fear. My explanation was that they were afraid of prisoners, afraid of law suits, afraid of staff members blowing whistles and afraid of word leaking out that corrections is, with a few notable exceptions, a product of a spin cycle. Out of a Charles Dickens Novel: This 19th Century culture is an anomaly in a day when transparency and accountability have become the new face of government. That the very taxpayers who fund state and county corrections in Maine at some $300M a year have no right to ask Why?, as the landscape is strewn with bodies and broken lives, has to be something out of a Charles Dickens novel. Convicted sex offender and probationer, Scott Penney, by committing suicide (http://www.kjonline.com/news/sex-offenderssuicide-raisesquestionsabout-treatment_2012-01-29.html), admittedly cut off his own path to healing and redemption, leaving in his trail broken hearts and lives his family, a victim and her family and those like Pauline Dube who took a chance on employing him and became his friend. The DOC, by treating him as a statistic and his death as a hazard of the game, continues to dance around its mission in the same way it has with the recent deaths of Victor Valdez, Sheldon Weinstein, Tom Hart and numerous others. The DOC to Scotts Mom, Linda Penney: You need grief counseling! Technically Right but Ethically Wrong: The wagon circlers are right when they say that Scotts Probation Officer (PO) did not cause his suicide. The cause was mental illness. Nevertheless, the system has become so defensive and self-protective that it has lost sight of the humanity of the public it serves. It functions too often from the gut-level perspective of stereotypes, sex offenders being classed as the most incorrigible but actually having a recidivism rate way below that of other offenders. POs run the gamut from the compassionate to bounty hunters. I have witnessed POs going to great length to be both cop and confessor to their clients. I personally have experienced being called by a PO to intervene in a clients case to keep him from going back to prison for four years at a cost of $56,000 a year. On the other hand, there are POs such as the one in Kennebec County who reportedly sits outside bars in the middle of the night to catch his clients violating the no-alcohol mandate. No Winners in This Game of Chicken: Who wins in this game of chicken? Certainly not the taxpayers of the good State of Maine! We continue to stuff away into cells and put onto lists our offenders, releasing them to the care of underfunded POs with no legislated standard of performance. The result is reflected in a 58% recidivism and probation violation rate, as reported by the Muskie Institute in 2008. The answer lies in what does not work.

It does not work to transfer a client to a PO without a written case management report and an orientation with both the old and new POs and the client. It does not work to run to the AGs Office for advice whenever a member of the public seeks answers. It does not work to fail to hold POs to a tight standard of performance. It does not work to overload Probation with so many cases that they lose sight of the humanity of their clients. It does not work for DOC administration to stonewall against facing the hurt that misfeasance deals to families or to suggest grief counseling to deflect the problem. What could possibly be lost in seeking answers for family members reeling from tragedy? Certainly not good will! Is risk aversion in the corrections job description? Needed are standards for becoming a PO other than appointment by the Commissioner. Needed is a hearing process for grievances. Needed are performance and discipline standards. To classify POs as law enforcement and equip them with weapons is sending the clear message that correction is the problem of others. One might legitimately ask, Who?. To our shame, corrections is a scarce commodity in a corrections industry mired in a long history of secrecy.