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 […]
Maine legislature
Voices from Solitary: Ray Luc Levasseur on Life in ADX
Raymond Luc Levasseur wrote the following essay back in 1996, when he was a prisoner at the federal supermax prison in Florence, Colorado, known as ADX (for “Administrative Maximum”). A Vietnam veteran and antiwar activist, Levasseur became a member of the revolutionary group United Freedom Front. In 1986, he and several others were convicted of taking part […]
The Maine Redemption: Bill Seeks to Restrict Use of Solitary in State's Prisons
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 […]