TIME TO RESPECT ALL PEOPLE
Another insightful article by Lance Tapley (see "Falling Down," November 7), focusing on abuses to prison staff, as well as to prisoners. Employees of our prisons and jails deserve better wages and in-depth training. Overcrowding, oversentencing, minimal funding, and lack of oversight by Maine people and our legislators continue to damage the futures of our incarcerated men, women, and their children. There are many good intentions spoken in committees about slowing down Maine's incarceration rate and reducing recidivism through education, addiction treatment, and alternative sentencing, but almost no action.
Most Maine people have no idea how much we are paying in taxes to support the Corrections Department and the men and women housed in prisons for nonviolent crimes and probation violations. Thanks to Lance Tapley for turning a complex, seemingly unsolvable problem into an understandable, and, based on my experience, correct description. There are solutions! And these solutions are not difficult, though they require imagination and acceptance of all people as human beings — prisoners and prison and jail staff alike.
Judy Garvey
Volunteers for Hancock Jail Residents: www.jailvolunteers.org
Blue Hill
Related:
Three years and counting, Corrections changes, Dangerous slurs, More 
- Three years and counting
For the past three years, Portland Phoenix contributing writer Lance Tapley has been the only reporter in Maine to pay attention to the appalling conditions suffered by inmates in the Maine State Prison
- Corrections changes
Like a movie hero, the NAACP’s new, young national president, Benjamin Jealous, swept into the 900-inmate Maine State Prison in Warren on Monday, quelling protests among the prisoners and, at least temporarily, rescuing the organization’s prison chapter from being snuffed out by state corrections officials.
- Dangerous slurs
A heavily tattooed, self-described Satanist serving a life sentence for savagely murdering two people in Augusta in 1998 — his 16-year-old stepdaughter and his 87-year-old former landlady — inmate John L’Heureux, 39, is probably not the man Maine’s gay-rights groups would choose to represent their cause in the state prison, if they were inclined to choose anyone there.
- Less than equal
This story has a bias. It’s in favor of human rights for all people.
- Prison in turmoil
Will reform have to wait for a new governor?
- Lockdown
If you were a reporter and you received a letter like the one excerpted below, what would you make of it? Lance Tapley discusses reporting the prisons
- Wave of reform
A wave of change is moving swiftly toward Maine’s jails and prisons. It could bring major reform — or a bureaucratic jumble.
- Lawmakers to probe prison
For years controversy has churned over the Maine State Prison's treatment of both inmates and correctional officers. For the first time, legislators have taken action.
- State should protect inmates’ rights
As Lance Tapley points out, denying prisoners access to human-rights protections is a mistake (see "Less Than Equal," October 2).
- An unprecedented crime
I have a true ghost story to tell: the story of 35,000 ghosts in America, the largely invisible inmates of our solitary-confinement “supermax” prisons.
- Prison ‘troublemaker’ confronts racism, medical abuse
Vacillating between grit and despair — between aggressive lawsuits and suicide attempts — Deane Brown, the prisoner who in 2005 blew the whistle on the torture of mentally ill inmates at the Maine State Prison’s solitary-confinement “Supermax” unit, is struggling against prison conditions in Maryland, where he was exiled by the Baldacci administration.
- Less
Topics:
Letters
, Criminal Sentencing and Punishment, Prisons, Maine prisons
