Guest Post by Lance Tapley I often tell people—perhaps shocking some—that a prison inmate I know, Deane Brown, is one of the most moral individuals I’ve ever met. This despite the fact that he had gotten in deep trouble since early childhood because, he once told me, he felt no moral compunction about taking things […]
A new article in The Crime Report describes a “dramatic reduction of solitary confinement” in Maine State Prison. The changes have taken place under the leadership of a new Commissioner of Corrections, Joseph Ponte–and under a Republican governor and state legislature. But as author Lance Tapley points out, the path to reform was paved by a grassroots political […]
As Lance Tapley reported last week, recent developments in Maine demonstrate the difference that reform-minded leadership can make to prison conditions, including the use and abuse of solitary confinement. Even as it has grown exponentially over recent decades, the use of solitary has generally been treated not as a human rights issue but as a matter of correctional […]
Not to be missed by Solitary Watchers is a new article on supermax confinement published in the Boston Review. The piece is by Lance Tapley, known for his investigative reporting on the subject from Maine in the Portland Phoenix. This comprehensive piece, which deserves to be read in full, makes a strong case for identifying solitary confinement–and the […]
There will be no charges brought against prison officials in the suspicious death last year of an inmate in solitary confinement at Maine State Prison’s supermax unit, the state Attorney General’s office announced last week. We are reprinting here the better part of an article on the subject from the Portland Phoenix by Lance Tapley, who […]
Maine Attorney General Janet Mills reportedly will review the results of an investigation by the state police into the death of a prisoner named Victor Valdez, who died last November in the Special Management Unit (SMU) of Maine State Prison. While the Maine Department of Corrections says he died of natural causes, inmates who say they witnessed the […]
Everyone concerned with solitary confinement has been closely watching a landmark effort in the Maine state legislature to pass a bill that would have significantly limited the practice in state prisons. On Monday that effort culminated in what some advocates have called a “gutted” version of the bill–and others see as a meaningful first step toward […]
Most Americans’ knowledge of the Maine prison system probably ends with the grim, gray penitentiary depicted in The Shawshank Redemption. But the prison of Stephen King’s imagination is a benign place compared with the current reality of incarceration in Maine’s state prisons–especially its 100-man solitary confinement unit. Conditions in the lockdown unit have become the subject of public debate in recent […]