Criminal Sentencing and Punishment

Latest Articles

Maine tortures women, too

But Riverview presents an alternative
The Maine Department of Corrections is an equal-opportunity torturer.
By LANCE TAPLEY | March 10, 2010

Corrections Dept.
In her early years as a Providence police officer, Tabitha Glavin didn't think much about why women ended up in prison; her job was to put them there.
By ELIZABETH RAU | March 03, 2010

Review: A Prophet

Jacques Audiard's Scarface for the new millennium
Visionaries thrive behind bars: Dostoevsky, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X. "The truth is ugly," explains one would-be sage, Charles Manson. "So we put our prophets in prison."
By PETER KEOUGH | March 02, 2010

The cost of torture

Solitary Confinement Bill Hearing
In the end, whether mass solitary confinement continues at the Maine State Prison supermax may come down to an issue of money rather than right or wrong. And resolving that issue may come down to whether the state wants to pay more now to pay less in the long term.
By LANCE TAPLEY | February 25, 2010

Seeking humane treatment

State and national efforts well under way
Some Maine people are taking moral responsibility for the way supermax inmates are treated.
By LANCE TAPLEY | February 17, 2010

Screams from solitary

‘By dehumanizing prisoners, we dehumanize ourselves.’
The 132-man supermax unit within the 925-man Maine State Prison is an expensive, taxpayer-funded torture chamber that for 18 years has sucked in mostly nonviolent, mostly mentally ill prisoners and ground them up by means of mind-destroying solitary confinement, officially sanctioned beatings, “restraint” devices resembling those in medieval dungeons, sexual humiliation, and psychiatric, medical, and legal neglect.
By LANCE TAPLEY | February 17, 2010

Anti-solitary campaign expands

Stopping Supermax Torture
As the February 17 State House public hearing approaches on the bill to restrict solitary confinement at the Maine State Prison, the National Religious Campaign Against Torture (NRCAT), which sparked national debate about Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo, has announced its support.
By LANCE TAPLEY | February 03, 2010

Finding her voice

An ex-con, a village, an opera
"There is a balm in Gilead," an old African-American spiritual has it, and sure enough, Percy Talbott (Kelly Caufield) finds that balm.
By MEGAN GRUMBLING | January 27, 2010

A lawyer’s adventures in bad judgment

Contempt of Court
People who know Keven McKenna know he is not a stupid man. Whether or not the Providence attorney, ex-state representative, and Harold Stassen of Providence mayoral races uses good judgment is another question.
By MARY ANN SORRENTINO | December 21, 2009

Corrections disobeys another federal court order

Solitary Confinement
For decades, as it has with other court orders, the Maine Department of Corrections has apparently been breaching a 1973 federal court’s decree that forbids disciplinary solitary confinement at the Maine State Prison beyond 10 days for minor offenses, or 30 days for major ones.
By LANCE TAPLEY | December 16, 2009

A mysterious new inmate death

Prison Scandal Watch
Despite a scandal earlier this year over a prisoner death, state corrections officials won’t allow the Phoenix to interview a Maine State Prison inmate who has claimed in letters that prison staff abused an ailing prisoner, Victor Valdez, before Valdez died in late November.
By LANCE TAPLEY | December 10, 2009

Can we have class dismissed?

Diverse City
What, you might ask, does Ahmed Hussein Ismail, the alleged gun-toting robber mistakenly let out of jail in Portland, have in common with Tareq and Michaele Salahi, alleged White House party-crashers?
By SHAY STEWART-BOULEY | December 09, 2009

Missing Persons singer Dale Bozzio jailed

Swinging a Dead Cat Dept.
Missing Persons singer Dale Bozzio is sitting in an Ossipee, New Hampshire, jail after dropping her appeal of a March animal-cruelty conviction.
By ASHLEY RIGAZIO | November 18, 2009

Courthouse bomber to speak about social change

Censorship averted
After it was initially canceled, a controversial talk by a radical activist will go on Thursday at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Ray Luc Levasseur, who grew up in Sanford, Maine, and became a radical in part due to his experiences as a soldier in Vietnam, will talk on campus in connection with a symposium on “social change.”
By RICK WORMWOOD | November 11, 2009

Suspect speaks; victim’s family begins $1-million-plus lawsuit

Prison Homicide
The widow of Sheldon Weinstein, the Maine State Prison inmate who died in April several days after allegedly being beaten by inmates, has taken the first step toward filing a wrongful-death lawsuit against prison guards, Department of Corrections “policy-making personnel,” and prison medical-care providers.
By LANCE TAPLEY | November 04, 2009

Bozzio's a somewhat missing person on the west coast

Cat Crazy Dept.
As she awaits a retrial on animal-cruelty charges in New Hampshire, Missing Persons frontwoman Dale Bozzio’s troubles continue in Southern California, where she faces eviction from her San Fernando Valley home over $4400 in missing rent payments.
By ASHLEY RIGAZIO | October 21, 2009

State should protect inmates’ rights

Letters to the Portland Editor, October 16, 2009
As Lance Tapley points out, denying prisoners access to human-rights protections is a mistake (see "Less Than Equal," October 2).
By PORTLAND PHOENIX LETTERS | October 14, 2009

Limiting Supermax solitary

Legislation Drafted
Representative James Schatz, a Blue Hill Democrat, has proposed legislation to tightly limit when prisoners can be kept in the solitary confinement of the 100-man Supermax unit of the Maine State Prison in Warren.
By LANCE TAPLEY | October 08, 2009

Injustice everywhere

Letters to the Portland Editor, October 9, 2009
Thank you for the timely interview with Harvey Silverglate.
By PORTLAND PHOENIX LETTERS | October 07, 2009

Injustice department

Letters to the Boston editor, October 2, 2009
Thank you Harvey Silverglate for shining a light on our criminal-injustice system with your new book Three Felonies a Day. And thank you Peter Kadzis for a great interview.
By BOSTON PHOENIX LETTERS | September 30, 2009

Dangerous slurs

Gay rights in prison
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.
By LANCE TAPLEY | October 01, 2009

Less than equal

State officials, including prejudiced human-rights commissioners, block inmate complaints
This story has a bias. It’s in favor of human rights for all people.
By LANCE TAPLEY | October 02, 2009

What's the scam?

Trying to bilk the Scientologists
Back on the morning of June 7, 1982, a man walked into the New York branch of the Middle East Bank on the 25th floor of a Madison Avenue office building and tried to deposit a $2 million check. The man, a native of the United Arab Emirates, left without completing the transaction.
By JIM SCHUH | September 28, 2009

Time for law to end torture

Letters to the Portland Editor, September 18, 2009
In a collaborative effort between human-rights activists and incarcerated Mainers, a bill to end the use and abuse of solitary confinement has been drafted and will be submitted to legislators soon.
By PORTLAND PHOENIX LETTERS | September 16, 2009

A Tale of Two Towns

Renowned for its roguish history, Charlestown is finally getting Hollywood's attention
Charlestown was baptized in bloodshed. Yet this unique, fertile turf has been generally overlooked by Hollywood, which has preferred instead its old rival South Boston, the primary backdrop for Oscar winners Good Will Hunting and The Departed .
By CHRIS FARAONE | September 29, 2009

10 years later, we told you so

Ten years of being right (well, mostly)
Like many in the alternative press, we pride ourselves on being ahead of the game. Sometimes, of course, that means we're wrong about what might be coming down the pike — that's part of the risk of being "out front" and not just reacting to the news as it happens.
By DEIRDRE FULTON | September 16, 2009

Prison activist: Board chairman wrong

Letters to the Portland Editor, September 11, 2009
I just finished reading the letter from Jon Wilson. Mr. Tapley was correct, the Board of Visitors is not living up to its mandate to represent the public's concerns about the Maine State Prison, nor is it minimally accountable in that it never filed an annual report until provoked by the scrutiny of Mr. Tapley's investigative journalism.
By PORTLAND PHOENIX LETTERS | September 09, 2009

Prison ‘troublemaker’ confronts racism, medical abuse

Exiled
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.
By LANCE TAPLEY | September 09, 2009

Fall guys

As summer winds down, sports crime picks back up
No shortage of sports-crime activity this week — in fact, it's been an extremely busy time, so much so that it's worth a bullet-point to get to some of the developments in brief.
By MATT TAIBBI | September 02, 2009

Article aided big oil

Letters to the Portland Editor, September 4, 2009
Nothing helps big oil, and big coal, more than a piece like "What's Wrong With Wind Power?" (by Deirdre Fulton, August 21).
By PORTLAND PHOENIX LETTERS | September 02, 2009

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