Cible’s warning enabled the state police SWAT team to arrest Susan Watland with her loaded gun in the Warren prison’s parking lot on October 24.
“I do have a regret that I trusted another inmate,” Watland said at his sentencing.
Cible has regrets, too. He never negotiated a reward in exchange for exposing the plot. All he required was the promise that he’d be moved to a prison out of state. He asked for a decent one. He never dreamed that the corrections officials to whom he had snitched would put his life in danger. “It was impossible for me to believe that I would be treated so terribly,” he later said.
Cible eventually concluded that Maine prison officials hate him because he had been an inmate advocate, as an officer of the institution’s NAACP branch, and he admits he got on their nerves for less altruistic reasons as well (see sidebar, “Gifted Felons”). But a critic of the American corrections scene, Paul Wright, editor of Prison Legal News, suggests that Cible was also the victim of the normal callousness that correctional officials exhibit toward the prisoners over whom they have power. “They don’t treat anyone differently,” Wright says. Their action in this case “is pretty much par for the course.”
Sent to a war zone
Last Christmas, Maine officials appeared to honor their agreement by transferring Cible to the New Jersey State Prison in Trenton. But that institution is notorious — “a gang war zone,” Cible later called it. In the mess hall in New Jersey, he says, “more blood is spilled on the floor than food or drink.”
As a result of the transfer, he lost many privileges. In Trenton, he was allowed out of his cell only four hours a day, he says, because Maine had told New Jersey that he had been “involved in a violent escape attempt.” He could not get into a work or education program. Because he didn’t have a prison job, he complained to Maine officials, he was being unfairly denied “good time” credits that could shorten his 29-year sentence, which still has 17 years to run, not counting future credits.
Far worse, Cible was exposed to the prison grapevine. By early this year, word had circulated widely in Maine about who had snitched on Watland and where he had been sent. In the State House one day, a private investigator with whom I was discussing another matter blurted out: “Did you know that [Mark Cible] is in New Jersey?” By this time, Cible’s photograph, his name, and personal information were up on the New Jersey prison’s Web site.
(The Phoenix is not using Cible’s real name to lessen the possibilities of retribution, although he would prefer that it be used. He feels public pressure may help rescue him from his dangerous situation.)
Besides Cible, his mother (who also will be unnamed here) and a retired Lincolnville clergyman who had befriended him, Dewey Fagerburg, protested his plight to Commissioner Magnusson, Maine prison warden Jeffrey Merrill, and Governor John Baldacci. They asked that Cible be transferred to a less dangerous prison and his location hidden. They feared Watland could reach him, even from a Maine Supermax cell, by promising money to whoever killed him. And they feared Cible would be targeted simply because he had violated the code. New Jersey inmates overly familiar with homicide might not look closely at the nuances of Cible’s action.
