Stan Moody

POB 240
Manchester, ME 04351
207/626-0594
www.moodyreport.wordpress.com

Prison Reform: A Fool’s Errand

March 8, 2011
Author: Stan Moody

The vivid memory of my interaction with prisoner Sheldon Weinstein an

hour or so before he died of a ruptured spleen alone in segregation has driven me
over the past year to advocate for prison reform in Maine. It has been a fool’s
errand – an impossible and illogical assumption that the same human rights
enjoyed by those of us on the outside transfer to those on the inside.
I remember saying to prisoners a number of times, “If you are not free on the
inside (meaning within yourself), you will never be free on the outside” – easy for
someone who goes home every night to say.
There is little doubt that a death here or there is the unintended consequence
of what we refer to as prison. Maine has had a half dozen or more within the past
year or so.
It begins at orientation, where slick presentations on the dangers lurking
within the prison system are punctuated by one or two events from a distant past (I
recall a 20-year veteran Unit Manager emoting about urine thrown on him once by
a segregated prisoner). Staff training is about power and control and maintaining
both.
At the same time, administration is forever groping for politically-correct
terms to soften abuses. “Jail” becomes “correctional facility”; “prison guards”
become “correctional officers”; “solitary confinement” becomes “segregation”;
swat-team-like takedowns become “extractions”.
The public may, in fact, have it right when it calls for locking ‘em up and
throwing away the key. We do that in a sort-of civil way, the incivility of what we
are doing being minimized by modern, high-tech people-processing boxes. “You
can eat off the floor” is a common description of the modern prison, a place kept
spotless to mask its inherent destruction of the human spirit.
Prison proponents advance the notion that prisons are intended to remove
dangerous people from society, while serving as a stark warning of the
consequences of committing crimes. A national recidivism and repeat offender rate

Prison Reform, Maine State Prison, Department of Corrections, Sheldon Weinstein, probation, parole,
recidivism, http://scribd.com/stanmoody, https://moodyreport.wordpress.com,
of 70% suggests, however, that once you break the spirit of a person by processing
him or her in a subhuman manner, you have created a repeat customer.
The moral aims of prison cannot be met under any circumstance. The longer
we in the US continue to believe in such aims, the more boxes we will have to
build to house our failed citizens.
Prison has become America’s socialist experiment, where in theory all are
equal. In practice, with a few notable exceptions, none is permitted to chin himself
up to the curb of humanity.
To impress on guards that they are dealing with human beings rather than
“inmates” to be moved like pawns on a chessboard is to ask them to rise way
above their pay grade by risking emotional vulnerability. Regimentation
encourages staff to maintain a dehumanizing distance.
Eating, sleeping, getting meds, exercising on schedule, worshipping,
learning and shuffling between those activities in 3-hour maximum segments is
intended less to encourage individual strengths than to keep the masses moving
and occupied.
Those who require special help, such as medical services, mental health
counseling, job training and spiritual counseling often become nuisances and
problems – interruptions in staff work schedules. Those staff members who are
mature and professional enough to go the extra mile become part of the nuisance
factor targeted for removal.
I vividly recall the warden at Maine State Prison telling me in his second
attempt to get me to retreat from raising human rights issues, “You are creating a
lot of chaos around here.” He outlasted me as an employee of the prison by about 4
months – “order” restored.
Prison strips staff and prisoners alike of human agency. It creates classes of
people who become incapable of functioning in society where more decisions are
required than when to turn off the light, go to the bathroom or stand watch on the
“mile”.
It is a place where those who are housed and where those who work can
succeed only by operating beneath the radar of policies and procedures to interject
their own brands of entrepreneurship, thereby to feel human and alive.
The only place for reform is with those about to go in for the first time and
those who have recently been released – bail, probation and parole.
Reduce the recidivism and reoffending rates to 20% through reclamation on
the outside, and we can bulldoze half of America’s prisons thereafter in 5 years.

Author Stan Moody has served in the Maine Legislature, was a prison chaplain and has written
scores of articles on prison reform. He is a board member of Solitary Watch and has received

Prison Reform, Maine State Prison, Department of Corrections, Sheldon Weinstein, probation, parole,
recidivism, http://scribd.com/stanmoody, https://moodyreport.wordpress.com,
the ACLU-ME Civil Liberties Baldwin Award. Stan’s articles can be read at
http://www.scribd.com/stanmoody and https://moodyreport.wordpress.com.

Prison Reform, Maine State Prison, Department of Corrections, Sheldon Weinstein, probation, parole,
recidivism, http://scribd.com/stanmoody, https://moodyreport.wordpress.com,