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Corrections a Growth Industry In Maine
Corrections: A Growth Industry in Maine
By:
Stan Moody
December 13, 2009
The third highest budget item for Maine – right behind Human Services and Education – is the cost of incarcerating the failures of Human Services and Education. Over $300M a year is spent in housing and maintaining services for some 4,000 inmates in a program that has been growing at the rate of 9% a year.[1] What any Maine business these days wouldn’t give for a 9% annual growth rate!
To put that into context, it works out to about $1,000 annually for every family in Maine, or 3x the annual cost of monitoring a residential burglar alarm system.
In the tradition of all growth industries, repeat business offers not only job security but the power to write your own ticket. That bodes ill for the 4,000 men and women already incarcerated and for the 56% of released inmates who make it back within 1 yr. after release.
“He’ll be back” being the common expectation within our penal institutions, it becomes over time a self-fulfilling prophecy. How inmates are treated remains somewhat important but becomes secondary to the need on the part of prison administration to keep everything in order, under control and, of course, secret.
With that in mind, Rep. James Schatz of Blue Hill has introduced for the upcoming legislative session a bill to establish “Minimum Standards Governing the Humane Treatment of Special Management Prisoners.” In layman’s language, this bill will address the conditions under which and the length of time that a person may be committed to solitary confinement.
Solitary confinement, known in more politically correct circles as “Special Management,” involves safe keeping for mentally ill inmates, discipline cases and inmates who have been beaten by other inmates, a common occurrence. It is a place where inmates are confined to cells for 23 hours a day, have no diversions other than reading and limited writing, wear orange jump suits and are restricted in 4-point restraints wherever they go outside their cells.
Solitary confinement is now recognized nationally as a place that literally drives people crazy. A March 2009 New Yorker article cited studies going back as far as the 1960’s that show a “diffuse slowing of brain waves in prisoners after a week or more of solitary confinement.”[2] EEG tests conducted in 1992 on prisoners of war in the former Yugoslavia showed brain abnormalities similar to those incurred in traumatic head injuries.[3] John McCain reportedly said of his 2 years of isolation as a prisoner of war in Viet Nam, “It crushes your spirit and weakens your resistance more effectively than any other form of mistreatment.”[4]
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