She has worked in the 100-man Special Management Unit, the “Supermax,” where the cutters and others with the biggest self-destructive and aggressive urges are kept in solitary confinement — which, studies show, damages prisoners further, perhaps permanently. It’s also where prisoners suffer the most abuse from guards. It seems obvious to Dawson that the more the guards provoke the mentally ill inmates, the more they will do what the guards don’t want them to do. But the prison administration, she says, prefers guards “who are degrading to a prisoner.”
Her descriptions fit with the results of the Phoenix’s two-and-a-half-year investigation of the prison, which has revealed physical, sexual, and mental abuse of inmates. On the national level, a 2004 Human Rights Watch report found that, in a typical American prison, “a culture of brutality has developed in which correctional officers know they can get away with excessive, unnecessary, or even purely malicious violence.” In a 2006 report, the private, blue-ribbon Commission on Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons found that “Better safety inside prisons and jails depends on changing the institutional culture, which cannot be accomplished without enhancing the corrections profession at all levels.”
Human rights complaints
After the harassment incidents, Dawson filed a discrimination complaint with the Maine Human Rights Commission. Then, prison “sergeants and captains” retaliated because of her complaint, she recounted to Baldacci. They continued “to target and scrutinize me and my character by looking for ways to terminate me.” So she filed another complaint with the commission, this time invoking the state Whistleblower’s Protection Act.
In her letter, she added: “I had lost my spirit as a correctional officer. There is a culture of abuse among the guards at the prison.” Its major effect, she suggested, is on the prisoners: “Any guard who treats the prisoners with respect and a desire to rehabilitate them is targeted by the other guards, who call them ‘care and treatment providers.’ This term is used by guards to say, ‘You’re not a corrections officer.’”
She’s not the only guard to say this. A well-respected sergeant, George Mele, quit his job at the prison in 2006 and left behind a frank “exit interview” leaked to the Web site “Supermax Watch.” It contains a harsh critique of the prison’s management, including: “When you begin to talk to prisoners you are labeled an inmate lover and chastised for it . . . to be polite to a prisoner is to show weakness.” He adds: “This job gives someone a great opportunity to help someone. I mean the prisoners. If the officers were encouraged to do this more and chastised for not doing it, the relationship between the prisoners and staff would improve.”
The prison’s cultivation of an us-versus-them attitude is one reason the guard turnover rate is so high, Dawson wrote in her letter. Those who don’t go along with the punishment program, “the best guards,” are “lost to the hazing and mistreatment by veteran guards.”
Staff shortages plague the prison. Corrections Commissioner Martin Magnusson told the Bangor Daily News that on one shift in 2007 the prison had 29 vacancies. The guard turnover rate is about 20 percent a year, while the national rate of 16 percent was considered high by the Commission on Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons. Peter Lehman, a former Maine State Prison inmate who is a PhD sociologist, says the well-meaning people among the prison staff “are pretty much defeated at every turn.” The prison, he says, manages its employees with degradation — “the same way they manage the prisoners.”
