His widow, Janet Weinstein, of New Hartford, said her estranged husband had broken a shoulder and a leg in a fall from a bunk at the Maine Correctional Center in Windham, but had recently been transferred to the Warren prison because of his need for physical rehabilitation.
“Why was a 64-year-old man sentenced to a sex crime, in a wheelchair, [put] in the general population?” of a maximum-security prison, she asked, very upset, in a phone interview.
Her lawyer, Scott Gardner, of Saco, who represented Sheldon Weinstein in his sex-abuse case, said as a convicted sex abuser Weinstein “was hypersensitive to his own safety,” and he would have protested any risk he faced. He described Weinstein as “extremely frail.”
Gardner said a suit against the state for damages is under consideration.
The state police officer who had called Janet Weinstein on June 10 to tell her the death was a homicide provided few details in a “confusing” conversation, she said. And when she was informed of his death in April a Corrections Department officer had told her that her husband had died “apparently from natural causes,” she said.
(Ironically, before he entered the prison system, Weinstein had called the Phoenix to express fears that, because he was a diabetic, he would “be killed” by the prison diet.)
This case is not the only recent example of prisoner-on-prisoner violence. On June 3 Warden Merrill told the Rockland Herald Gazette that a prisoner had been recently stabbed by another prisoner using a “shank,” a homemade knife. The victim was not seriously injured, and the suspect was put in the Supermax, he said, but he disclosed little other information. Last year, Magnusson, in discussing a hostage-taking incident at the prison, told the Legislature’s Criminal Justice Committee, “There are probably 300 inmates right now with a weapon in their hand.” Legislators expressed no interest in this fact.
Investigations of corruption and prison ‘culture’
Some legislators, however, are expressing an interest in the prison. State investigations they launched in March have produced several reports critical of the prison’s management. (See “Lawmakers to Probe the Prison,” by Lance Tapley, April 10.)
The state controller’s office, which audits state agencies, told the Legislature’s Government Oversight Committee on May 22 that the prison’s two auto-repair garages, which employ inmates as workers, have such poor financial controls, including “inaccurate accounting” and poor documentation, that “it would have been difficult to find” fraud or theft had it occurred, according to auditor Ruth Quirion.
Her department’s detailed written report said complaints about corruption at the auto-restoration programs had been, for years, “not only numerous but continuous.” Later, in e-mails, Controller Edward Karass said other government agencies, including the FBI and the state attorney general, had been looking into the allegations since 1994, but they had not found proof of wrongdoing.
However, because the auto programs performed work for prison employees and their family members without charging for labor, there was a “conflict of interest” and an opportunity for improper personal gain, Quirion told the committee.
Oversight Committee member Richard Nass, a Republican senator from Acton, suggested the prison forbid employees from having any work done for them by inmates, citing complaints also about two wooden sleighs restored for Warden Merrill in the woodshop. (The controller’s office found that Merrill had paid $1295 for the work.)
