November 11 - 17, 2005 - Portland Phoenix (ME) Torture In Maine's Prison Inside The Supermax: Testimony From Six Prisoners And A Videotape; The Head Of Corrections Promises Reform By Lance Tapley

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Video: Prisoner extraction at Maine's Supermax prison

"The mission of the Maine State Prison is to provide a safe, secure, and humane correctional environment for the incarcerated offender." -- Prison Web Page

Five hollering guards wearing helmets, face shields, and full body armor charge into a mentally ill man's cell. The first attacker smashes a big shield into him, knocking him down. The attackers jump on him, spray Mace into his face, push him onto his bed, and twist his arms to his back so they can handcuff him. They connect the cuffs by a chain to leg irons. Then they take him into the corridor, cut off all his clothes, and carry him naked and screaming through the cellblock, continuing to Mace him. They put him in an observation room where they bind him to a restraint chair with straps. He remains there naked and cold for hours, yelling and mumbling.

To many people, this scene would look like torture. A scene like it might have taken place in the infamous Abu Graib prison near Baghdad, where American soldiers tormented captured Iraqis. But as described to me independently by six prisoners, including some who have suffered this attack, it is business as usual -- an "extraction" for disobedience -- in the Special Management Unit, also known as the SMU or the "Supermax," a 100-cell, maximum-security, solitary-confinement facility inside the new 1100-inmate Maine State Prison in Warren. The Supermax's regulations say it is a place for prisoners who are threats to others, are escape risks, are found with contraband, or who simply don't obey the rules.

For me to verify the prisoners' stories, a source who wished not to be identified -- to preserve his relationship with the prison -- gave the Phoenix a videotape of a cell extraction of a young man. He was not one of the men I interviewed. The prison tapes each extraction in order to prove, some people would say ironically, that the prisoner is not mistreated. The videotape I obtained, although dated to 2000, corroborates the stories I heard. In the end, the man is fully naked in the restraint chair, with no trace of human dignity. My source tells me sometimes there are women guards present. According to the prisoners I interviewed, it gets a lot worse than what the video depicts.

After collecting this and other information that suggest the Supermax fits some classic definitions of torture, I went to interview Maine's corrections commissioner, Martin Magnusson, in his Augusta office beside the beautiful, smooth Kennebec River. He is, at 57, a plain-speaking, heavy-set, balding man and the former warden of the prison.

As I begin reading the notes that became the first paragraph of this story, he interrupts me halfway through, his demeanor gloomy.

He wants to "de-escalate use of the restraint chair," he says, and he is developing a plan to do it. Although he believes there are legitimate reasons for extractions, and he says more than 200 have already been done this year, he has tried to tighten up the rules on them, he claims. And he has reduced use of the chair from 1300 in 2003 to a rate that will see 900 uses by the end of this year, he says. I haven't been able to discern an exact number, but other states do use the restraint chair and the method of extraction.

While woman guards may be present when such discipline occurs, he says he ordered over a year ago that prisoners be clothed while in the chair, whenever practicable. He also claims that now "in no way is the chair being used for punishment," although the Supermax prisoners dispute this. Rather, he says, it is used when someone is a threat to others or himself. He adds: "That was always the way it was supposed to be," but he admits that in the past each case "wasn't being reviewed."

He also announces what appears to be a major turnaround: He wants to reform the way many things are done at the Supermax. "We need to look at the system and see how we can do better," he says, suggesting that carrots (rewards) might be emphasized over sticks (punishment).

The treatment of prisoners at the Supermax has long been controversial. Prisoners, defense attorneys, and the few prison watchdog organizations tend to portray the extractions -- and the entire supermax system, which in the past 20 years has become widespread across the country -- as part of a cruel, unnecessary, counterproductive, and expensive-to-the-taxpayer cycle of violence that has roughly shoved aside all pretence of "corrections."

They depict the worst part of this cycle in this way:

• First, a mentally ill or unstable prisoner is brought to the Supermax, often for a nonviolent violation like having contraband such as forbidden tools or illegal drugs (by numerous reports, heroin is prevalent in the prison).
• Next, the prisoner acts up under the pressure of weeks or months of confinement to his cell and under the stress of living with more-disturbed prisoners in his cellblock, some of whom throw their urine, feces, and blood at the guards, who become frightened and incensed.
• If he commits a violation of Supermax discipline, as punishment the guards extract the prisoner from his cell and put him in a restraint chair.
• After one or more of these harsh episodes, the prisoner becomes more mentally ill. He may become one of those who throw filth at the guards, creating an extremely hazardous situation for them, himself, and other prisoners. Each prisoner I interviewed complained vigorously that the SMU was not properly cleaned -- in fact, that it reeked of excrement, urine, and blood.
• Once again, the prisoner is extracted and put in a restraint chair -- possibly, many times more. This treatment drives him crazier. He likely will be prosecuted for assault on the guards and sentenced to five more years in prison, much of which time he may spend in the SMU.
• Finally, the prisoner shows all the symptoms of being totally insane, in despair, and suicidal -- and suicidal threats lead to more extractions.

Magnusson, the corrections commissioner, says "there's some truth" to this cycle, though he feels "it doesn't happen that much."

The truth is hard to verify precisely. Many prisoners have made their way in the world through deception. Two defense attorneys who are horrified by the Supermax nevertheless warned me against accepting everything I heard from prisoners at face value. But the prisoners' stories and those collected by prison critics hang together well.

And the prisoners seem more forthcoming than their keepers. The prison was at first uncooperative with my efforts to interview inmates and continued to be uncooperative with my wish to interview prison personnel. I never was allowed to interview the warden, Jeffrey Merrill, who has been sick -- but neither was I allowed to interview his deputies. The Supermax was off limits to me. It appears to be off limits to almost all independent observers.

After the intervention of the governor's office, however, I finally was allowed to see the six prisoners. I was separated from them by thick glass, and we spoke through tinny speakers. They were in handcuffs, leg irons, and orange prison jumpsuits.

And I finally obtained a lengthy interview with Commissioner Magnusson. Surprisingly, he did not want to defend the Supermax as much as he wanted to convince me he was going to reform it.

Both he and prison critics have similar explanations of why these big, high-tech institutions were built across the country, with their restraint chairs, in the 1980s and 1990s. As America's incarceration rate, which became the highest in the world, went through the roof of the old state prisons, the population explosion threw the old and new prisons into turmoil; and supermaxes segregated the most troublesome inmates. According to some prison critics, supermaxes also were part of the mushrooming, profitable prison industry and something of a cruel fad.

Maine's Supermax, originally a freestanding facility, opened in 1992. In 2001, the new state prison, which replaced Thomaston's 1824 landmark, was built around it. Literally and metaphorically, it is at the core of the new prison system.

Prison critics say that supermaxes and the rest of our country's prison policies are failures, as irrefutably demonstrated by the high recidivism rate among prisoners -- their return to crime -- and by the continuing tumult roiling the many new prisons, including Maine's.

Michael James

"They beat the shit out of you," says SMU prisoner Michael James, speaking hunched against the thick glass. He is talking about the extractions he's endured. "They push you, knee you, poke you." The guards' full roughness doesn't get captured on the videos, he says, because the camera gazes at the guards' backs.

"They slam your head against the wall and drop you on the floor while you are cuffed," James says, showing a scar on his chin -- "They split it wide open."

"They're yelling 'Stop resisting! Stop resisting!' when you are not even moving," he says, although he admits he resists sometimes. He says he's been Maced countless times and has spent long periods in the restraint chair.

"There's a lot who shouldn't work here because they get a kick out of controlling people," he adds.

Then he says, his eyes brightening: "There's some [guards] that are absolutely awesome."

You know, instantly, something is wrong when you meet an otherwise handsome Michael James, 22. He has a small top of the head and a very prominent brow ridge over deep-set eyes. You notice the scars on his shaved head -- including, when he bends over, a deep, horizontal gash on the top. He got this, he says, by scraping his head over and over on the metal slot in his cell door used for passing in food trays.

"They were messing with me," he explains. "I couldn't stand it no more."

He is referring to the guards, who he says taunt him.

"I've knocked myself out by running full force into the [cell] wall" in frustration, he says.

James says a family member beat him as a child: "I got a broken nose. I was punched, kicked, slapped, bitten, thrown against the wall." He started seeing mental-health workers when he was four, he says, and getting medication for his mental problems when he was seven. He only made it through the second grade in regular school, he says, and he spent most of his childhood in the state's mental hospitals and homes for mentally disturbed children.

He's been diagnosed, he says, with bipolar disorder (manic depression) and antisocial personality disorder. He says his other diagnoses are attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, and oppositional defiance disorder. He is on several psychotropic medications, he says, but he claims he seldom gets to see a mental-health worker.

His lawyer, Joseph Steinberger of Rockland, is trying to get him admitted to the state's Riverview Psychiatric Center in Augusta, which has replaced the Augusta Mental Health Institute. But for the prison authorities "to admit that I need to be there would be to admit that they were wrong," James says.

He was in trouble with the law as a juvenile, he says, but his real problems began when he was taken off medications by one hospital when he was 18. He says he got into "selling drugs, robbing people, fighting, burglaries." His combination of offenses has resulted in his current 12-year sentence. Of the four years he has been in prison, all but five months have been spent in the SMU, he says.

James confirms a story I heard from another prisoner: He believes a guard asked a convicted murderer how much it would cost to have James killed. James made an internal prison complaint, but he says nothing was done because the guard said he was only joking.

He is facing a November 28 trial for assaulting an officer by throwing feces on him. His lawyer, he says, will plead insanity.

The SMU is "disgusting, filthy," he says. "The showers haven't been cleaned for months. There's slime and blood and shit on the walls. They just sweep it up."

Snow comes under the door of his cell in the winter, he says, and the food is insufficient. He says the doors to two inmates' cells are chained so that if a fire begins they could not get out when the doors are opened automatically.

"It's mental torture, even for people who are able to control themselves," he says.

But the worst thing about prison, he believes, beyond all that he describes, is "they deny me access to better myself."

Other Supermax prisoners confirm James's story and his complaints. All the others I talk with are worried about him. As I go through my interviews, I am struck by how concerned these criminals are for each other, how candid they seem about their crimes and psychological problems, and how articulate many of them are.

Deane Brown

One of the most articulate is Deane Brown, 41, a big man with long, dark hair, a Fu Manchu beard, and lively eyes. Sentenced to 59 years for a string of burglaries in the mid-'90s, he jokes that he was given a far longer sentence than the man who murdered his brother. He recently marked the point when he has spent the majority of his life in prison.

He is worried he will soon be transferred out of state -- as several Supermax friends recently were -- because of his complaints about conditions there. He has written letters posted on the Web site called the Maine Supermax Watch and has had his telephone calls played over WRFR, a small Rockland nonprofit radio station.

He was put in the Supermax in May for possessing contraband, he says -- such things as a razor blade, a screwdriver, a soldering iron, and wire, all of which he claims he used for fixing other inmates' televisions and electronic devices. But the prison views him as an escape risk, he says.

"They put you down here for any reason," he says. "There is no charge against me for trying to escape." He believes that, under a recent United States Supreme Court decision, Supermax prisoners are entitled to due process on their placement in such a restrictive setting. He says the prison gives him no idea what he has to do to be readmitted to the general prison population.

Since being put in the SMU, he has become concerned about his teeth, which are visibly loose and coated with gray plaque. He isn't allowed a toothbrush or floss, he says. He shows me a tiny plastic device the prison gave him. It fits over the tip of a finger. It does not work well enough to keep his teeth clean, he says.

He is protesting the SMU by not taking his diabetic medicine, he says. He feels his health is more threatened by the SMU's lack of hygiene. The food cart is "dragged through feces," and "the ceiling is plastered with feces," he says.

"It's supposed to be an administrative program for correcting behavior, but it's creating animals," he says. "I saw a guy eat his own feces."

Seeing me wince, Brown half-apologizes: "I know it's distressing."

Of Michael James, he says: "I saw him bare-assed naked in chains being dragged through the cellblock." He believes James has spent more time in the restraint chair than anyone else.

Brown says he saw another prisoner after a cell extraction with his eye and nose bleeding.

He believes the SMU's 23-hour daily lockdown is psychological torture. It's a combination, he says, of sensory deprivation, a constant cellblock din with no diverting radio or TV allowed, and with lights on 24/7. For one hour, five days a week, he says, the prisoners are allowed to exercise in a 6-foot-wide, 30-foot-long cage that he calls a "kennel."

Although Brown refers to others in the SMU as mentally ill, he says he has been in a mental institution and a number of homes for troubled children and adolescents. He suffered early child abuse, he says, recounting how he was chained to the sink at home. He spent years at a boot-camp-type institution for drug abusers that he considers abusive, he says: "Three times they tied me up and buried me up to my neck in dirt overnight in the cold."

Obviously quite intelligent, he is teaching himself ancient Greek. He also is reading at the same time the Bible and philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (of "God is dead" fame) and comparing them.

"Something inside of you that tells you something is wrong . . . that's God," he says.

Joseph Reeves

"I had my arm broken while handcuffed behind my back while face down on the floor and Maced so I couldn't see," recounts Joseph Reeves, 25, a narrow-faced man with a wispy, billy-goat beard and delicate tattoos on his pale skin.

Guards broke his arm during an extraction, he says: "They said I wouldn't open my hands, but I was handcuffed and I blacked out. My hands were clenched."

When he came back to the unit from the hospital, he says, the prison staff, suspecting contraband in the cast, cut it off with dull scissors. As a result of the arm not healing properly, he has a piece of loose bone in it, he says.

He, too, is concerned about Michael James: "They constantly beat that kid." Such mentally troubled inmates "would rather die than be here," he says. Lots of SMU inmates have tried to kill themselves, he claims.

He has had mental problems. "I'm impulsive," he admits, a trait that leads him sometimes to resist the extractions. He has been in several mental institutions, he says, and he feels he doesn't get the care for his mental problems that he needs.

He also is upset with what he calls "sexual intimidation" in the form of strip searches and "butt searches."

The guards "at the drop of a hat will Mace you," he says. Like the other prisoners I interviewed, he says of the guards "there are good ones, but they are so outnumbered." The prisoners speak fondly of the "good" guards.

Reeves is serving a five-year term for robbery and gun possession, he says, and much of it so far has been spent in the SMU.

After my visit, he wrote me that he is in a 16-cell "pod" all by himself. He sent me pages from an Amnesty International publication on how isolation, degradation, threats, and "monopolization of perception" constitute torture.

Norman Kehling

Norman Kehling, 47, small, balding, seemingly a calm type, is the former head of the institution's "long timers" group, he says. He has been in the Maine State Prison since 1989, serving 40 years for arson -- a record sentence, he believes, when no one was hurt in the blaze. He is in the SMU this time for trafficking in heroin, he says. There is "quite a bit" of heroin in the prison, he claims.

Also confirming the other descriptions of the extractions, Kehling tells of what happened to a young prisoner who pulled a sprinkler alarm: "They told him to cuff up. Then they rolled in on him with a team [in his cell]. They put it to him, plowed into him, took him down."

"A lot of people act up" in the Supermax, he says, because "It's easy to stir these people up," describing the guards as instigators. And part of the problem, he says, is that the guards are scared: "I've seen them shaking."

He doesn't believe there is meaningful help for mental-health cases in the Supermax:

"One guy cut his testicle out of his sack . . . They shouldn't be here."

He adds: "This place breeds hate. What they're doing obviously isn't working."

Michael Chasse

"Conditions have been consistently filthy for the last eight years since I've been here," says Michael Chasse, a very tall, well-spoken, 30-year-old man with slicked-down black hair.

He describes an SMU inmate who constantly tried to cut himself because "he was so frustrated with the ways officers treated him. There's a lot of self-destructive behavior in here. A lot of these people are suicidal."

(In fact, despite supposedly overwhelming security, within the past six years one inmate has killed himself in the Supermax and another in the adjacent 36-bed psychiatric unit -- only half of which is used because of insufficient staff, prison authorities say.)

On Michael James, he comments: "That kid has gone nuts since he was put in here. I've seen him get beat up. I've seen two cops jamming his hands in a tray slot." ("Cops" is a term some prisoners use for their guards.)

He tells of the psychological effects of being locked into his cell for 23 hours a day: "There is a noise that comes from the air vents. The sounds start to seem like voices. I have built imaginary relationships with those white noises."

He admits he threw feces and urine at two officers. He says it was done in return for their exposing him to feces and urine in his cell: "My dignity was stripped."

Although he says most of the people in the Supermax should not be there, he doesn't make that claim for himself: "I'm one of the bad apples."

Indeed, he seems proud of the notoriety of his crimes. He was involved in a bungled robbery, in which he was shot, at the Bangor home of the brother of former Senator and Defense Secretary William Cohen. During the trial for that crime, he escaped from his jailers, stabbing a couple of officers in the process, in an episode caught partly on videotape by a television news crew who happened to be there -- "front page of the Bangor Daily News," he notes. He is in the Supermax this time, he says, for having a "weight bar" in his cell.

Chasse is a classic jailhouse lawyer, able to reel off detailed legal citations from memory. He believes many placements in the SMU are illegal because they are based on rumors of what a prisoner might do. "This place runs on confidential information," he says, but he believes court decisions require "an independent assessment" of the credibility of an informer.

Like the other prisoners, he has a sad story to tell of his youth. But now, he says, he is trying to make his life meaningful -- though he expects to spend the rest of it behind bars -- "trying to help people through the laws. I'm devoting myself to protecting prisoners' constitutional rights."

Charles Limanni

About a month previous, says Chuck Limanni, an inmate threw a lunch tray back out the tray slot. The guards told him to come out and clean it up, and he refused:

"They instantly Maced him -- behind a locked door! Then the extraction team came . . . He was put in the restraint chair because he refused to clean up" the food on the cellblock floor, Limanni says indignantly.

He is another inmate who is concerned about Michael James: "That kid doesn't belong here. He never had a chance." The guards, he says, "antagonize him, call him names. It makes me sick. This place breeds hate. I hate cops. I hate the government."

He adds that the prison system "is set up to hurt you, to torture you."

Good-looking, with longish brown hair, 33, he was put in prison for robbery -- "not the first time" -- and in the SMU last May for, he says, "suspicion of drug trafficking." But, he says, no drugs were found.

He feels the real reason was "I'm a leader. I have a lot of willpower. I'm a political threat to them."

In the Supermax, "there's no program here. If [the inmates] had something to do, they wouldn't be doing this shit" -- acting up.

Others -- Even The Commissioner -- Agree

Recognition of the problems of Maine's Supermax and of supermaxes in general is by no means restricted to those confined in it.

The process by which people are put in the Supermax is "completely unconscionable," says Rockland attorney Joseph Steinberger, who has represented a number of SMU inmates and now represents James. And once prisoners are there, "Basically they live like animals in cages," he says.

He is strongly opposed to keeping mentally ill people in such an environment:

"I had a client who was wildly delusional. He attacked a staff member. He had no idea what he had done. Because a judge insisted, he was brought to Riverview [the new state mental hospital]. He has made enormous progress there."

Riverview, he says, "is a fine place, but they have so few beds it's pathetic."

Behind this unpleasant scene, Steinberger says, "the real villain is the governor and the Legislature. It's cheaper politically to keep them in a cage" -- but not cheaper financially, he adds.

He sees the entire prison system as largely a failure: "There's a heroin epidemic at the prison. Some people are getting addicted in prison who never used heroin before. I've defended at least a dozen people who've been accused of having heroin in prison."

Another Rockland attorney who also represents many prisoners, Barry Pretzel, finds the Supermax "inhumane and unacceptable." Of the extractions, he says, "it appears its purpose is to humiliate."

Like Steinberger, he is especially concerned about what the Supermax does to its many mentally ill prisoners. "It's a circular pattern," he says. "It tends to make people who are mentally ill act up even more . . . A lot of the prisoners are in there for relatively minor offenses, but they end up serving 'a life sentence on the installment plan,' as I heard a judge say."

A retired lawyer in Damariscotta, Richard Gerrity, has been campaigning for some time to have Michael James dealt with in a humane way. Protesting that the SMU "is a drop-off for the mentally ill that no one, including the inmates, want to deal with," he pleads in a letter to Commissioner Magnusson that James "needs to be moved immediately to a psychiatric institution before he destroys himself."

Others who have protested Maine's Supermax include Carol Carothers, a leader of the Maine chapter of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill. In 2001, she was quoted in the Bangor Daily News as saying the Supermax's practices "might have crossed into the realm of torture."

The Maine Civil Liberties Union and especially its parent organization, the American Civil Liberties Union, have long protested mistreatment of prisoners.

"State officials across the country are realizing what the ACLU has been saying all along, which is that Supermax conditions are neither a humane nor an effective type of confinement," writes MCLU director Shenna Bellows in an email to me.

In 2000, in a case involving an SMU inmate, a Maine Superior Court judge, Andrew Mead, commented in his decision: "It is difficult to imagine any person -- mentally healthy or not -- bearing up under months of such conditions."

The ACLU has sued corrections officials in several states over Supermax conditions. In Wisconsin in 2002, the state agreed in a settlement to remedy conditions at its Supermax, including banning the confinement of seriously mentally ill prisoners. In Indiana earlier this year, the ACLU sued prison officials over that state's Supermax, commenting in a press release: "Locking up prisoners with mental illness in small windowless cells is psychological torture." In a law review article, ACLU lawyer David Fathi notes that in the 1800s the United States Supreme Court referred to solitary confinement as torture.

In 2000, the United Nations questioned the United States government about torture, including housing mentally ill patients in supermaxes. The US responded, according to a UN press release, that in federal prisons: "Prisoners were screened and monitored for mental illness; and classification systems were in place so that confinement was not indefinite and that prisoners meeting certain criteria were transferred to less structured settings where appropriate." The US response did not deal with state prisons.

But the most significant critic of the Supermax, to me, may be Commissioner Magnusson. In our two-and-a-half-hour interview -- and even before I lay out fully the condemnations I had of the Supermax -- he agrees that much needs to be changed.

"We should be open to see if there are better ways to operate it," he says, and he talks of bringing in a national team of experts soon to see how this could be done.

When asked for comment on the Corrections Department's commitment to reform, Governor John Baldacci replies in a statement from his press office: "The governor is confident that the department led by Commissioner Marty Magnusson is not only open to constructive criticism, but embraces it -- that's why we see improvements."

With the prison system as a whole, Magnusson says, his intention is "to go from a more punitive approach to more of a treatment approach."

He adds: "It will be a real struggle to get the staff to change." In a later telephone conversation, he comments: "I will piss off some of the staff by saying this."

Change may be a struggle for him, too, he admits: "I came up through a system where discipline is what you do."

In his law review article on the national Supermax scene, ACLU attorney David Fathi writes: "There are unmistakable signs that the bloom is off the Supermax experiment." Corrections Commissioner Magnusson's comments may indicate this is the case in Maine, too.b

Reforming The Supermax

In the national boom in Supermax construction, "corrections got derailed for a period of time," says a federal official who has been contacted by the state for advice on how to improve conditions at the state prison's Special Management Unit. The Supermax boom, he suggests, came out of despair: "For a time, there was a thought that nothing worked."

The Supermax also was "the animal of public-policy makers," says George Keiser, head of the prison division of the community corrections unit of the National Institute of Corrections, which is part of the US Department of Justice. The Supermax idea, he adds, is "not one of our brightest lights."

At the Supermax's origins, too, he says, there was the "mind-set in control settings to strong-arm it."

The alternative, the new direction in corrections, he says, is "evidence-based policy and practice." By this approach, he means a system that lets people out of prison who will have less recidivism--be less prone to commit crimes. But there are other measures of improvement, such as fewer assaults in prison and less risk for guards.

The scientific evidence, he says, points away from punishment and toward treatment, toward changing behavior instead of warehousing prisoners.

For example, in the case of an inmate who is acting up, instead of "exerting force" on him, a prison officer might threaten him, Keiser says, by telling him that he will call his mother: "You might not think it would work, but sometimes it works."

Although this approach to corrections might seem classically liberal -- reform oriented -- as opposed to classically conservative -- oriented to punishment -- Keiser denies the liberal-conservative dichotomy.

"From a conservative point of view, we will save money. We will have fewer new crimes. We will have fewer victims."

It meets, he says, the "bottom-line" test.

Obstacles Abound For A Corrections Commissioner Promising To Make Changes At Maine's State Prison

In part one of this report ["Torture in Maine's Prison," November 11], based on interviews with six prisoners, I described conditions that could be called torture at the Maine State Prison's 100-cell Supermax, otherwise known as the Special Management Unit, a maximum security, solitary-confinement facility, in Warren.

In that piece Martin Magnusson, the state's corrections commissioner, acknowledged that conditions need to be improved at the Supermax. He said he intends to improve them in part by reducing the numerous brutal "extractions" of unruly prisoners from their cells in order to strap them into restraint chairs. A videotape I obtained showed a SWAT-like team in body armor and face shields dragging a naked, screaming, mentally ill prisoner in chains through the cellblock to the chair. The Supermax and the prison as a whole have large numbers of mentally ill prisoners.

Before last week's story was published, I recounted to several critics of the prison system what Magnusson, the former prison warden, had told me about Supermax reform. They were skeptical.

"Sometimes those in charge promise a fix, but five years later nothing has changed," said Barry Pretzel, a Rockland attorney whose clients have included a number of Supermax prisoners. "They're either out of office, or they're hoping no one will call them on an earlier promise."

"It's hard to imagine reprogramming that physical space," said Craig McEwen, a sociology professor, academic dean at Bowdoin College, and a long-time critic of Maine's prisons.

I myself became a little skeptical when John Baldacci's chief aide, Lee Umphrey, sent me an email expressing the governor's commitment to reform -- and he mistakenly left on the bottom of the message his email correspondence with Denise Lord, the associate corrections commissioner. The correspondence suggested that the commitment hadn't directly come from Baldacci and that my questions were being dealt with perfunctorily.

"Give me two sentences and I will be all set," Umphrey told Lord in the email.

In our conversations, even Magnusson sometimes sounded skeptical of reform. "I don't know a more humane way to deal with the situation when they're hurting themselves," he said, describing the use of the restraint chair.

But he pledged to bring a group to Maine next month from the National Institute of Corrections (NIC) -- "some of the top people in the country . . . to review all our practices."

The NIC is a think-tank on prison issues. It's a part of the United States Department of Justice and was established after the 1971 Attica Prison riots in New York.

A top NIC official in Washington, DC, George Keiser, confirms that the Maine Department of Corrections had approached his agency for help in reforming the Supermax, but he says it is unlikely the NIC would send people to Maine, at least immediately. "We want to take three or four folks from Maine to the Colorado Department of Corrections," he says, to let them see an "effective" Supermax.

The timing of the department's vow to reform also inspires skepticism. Both Keiser and Denise Lord of the corrections department say the arrangements with NIC were made only in the first week of November, and I interviewed Magnusson, laying out for him my story of alleged torture at the Supermax, on the Monday of that week.

But Magnusson says his department's interest in reforming Supermax practices goes back a ways. For a long time "we've tried to figure out how to get them to stop throwing feces and cutting up," he says. Recently, he's been encouraged by the success he's seen at the Long Creek Youth Development Center, in South Portland.

There, the recidivism rate -- the return to crime of released offenders -- has plummeted from 50 percent to 10 percent in one year, he says. Magnusson guesses the state prison's recidivism rate is about 40 percent (he claims not to have hard numbers). The national recidivism rate is 55 to 60 percent, he says, and California's reaches 75 percent. The Warren inmates have been in prison an average of three to five times, according to Magnusson.

The youth-center reform was accomplished, he believes, through "much improved programming" at the facility. And now "community resources are stronger" for the young inmates. The staff did so much training in how to "de-escalate" use of the restraint chair -- verbally calming down individuals instead of throwing them in the chair -- that now the chair is "out in a warehouse getting cobwebs on it." At this institution, too, he says, a "progressive reward system" was successfully put in place.

The reforms at the youth center took place after years of intense public criticism. Amnesty International in the late 1990s accused the place of mistreating children. A former inmate claimed, in a 2001 lawsuit, that he suffered excessive solitary confinement and use of the restraint chair; the state settled out of court for $600,000. The youth center's superintendent was replaced in 2003.

Magnusson says he wants to bring in the NIC to help implement a rewards system at the Supermax and to create stages whereby an inmate can eventually be assimilated back to the general prison population. For example, a prisoner could earn more time outside the cell than the five hours a week now permitted.

The basic intent? "To go from a more punitive approach to more of a treatment approach," Magnusson says.

It Sounds Good, But . . .

If Magnusson is sincere in wanting to reform the current system -- and he switches in conversation from the Supermax to the entire prison system when he talks about reforms -- he faces enormous obstacles.

The 2001 creation of the new Warren prison, which was built around the Supermax, caused big problems, and not much money has been provided by the state Legislature to deal with them.

While waiting to interview Supermax prisoners, I talked casually with several guards. They had little good to say about the new prison.

"Ninety-nine percent of the people here would go back to the old prison in a heartbeat," one tall, middle-aged guard told me, referring to both prisoners and guards. The old prison in Thomaston was "quiet," he said, unlike the new one: "There was a pecking order" among the inmates. A woman guard nodded agreement.

"You're right," Magnusson responds when told of these complaints. The "much more comfortable" old prison had 430 beds, he says, and the new one quickly filled up to its 1100-prisoner capacity, creating a host of adjustment problems, especially with the addition of hundreds of young prisoners from the Maine Correctional Center, in South Windham, and the overcrowed county jails. And the design of the new prison placed guards tensely "alone in a pod," or cellblock, with prisoners.

Assaults on guards and prisoners shot up, helping fill the Supermax, which is used to hold troublesome prisoners (according to state officials, the Supermax usually is at about 90 percent capacity). And so did the difficulty of recruiting and retaining personnel at the prison, which now has 428 employees. Magnusson noted that, while there are 600 more adult prisoners in the corrections system than there were in 1995, there are 100 fewer staff. Right now he is faced with a mandatory overtime pay problem because, he says, he can't understaff the prison.

The Legislature and the governor have been stingy in funding corrections (my characterization, not Magnusson's). The state prison budget has gone up in dollar figures, reflecting the increasing number of inmates from $21 million in 1998 to $32 million in 2004. The total corrections budget is $132 million this year. But Magnusson has been unable to hire more permanent staff for a long time, he says. (According to a printout he provided, it has been about four years.) He says the reforms he will undertake will not involve significant expenses.

Maine has the second-lowest crime rate in the nation, and the rate has been declining, as is happening nationally. Our state also has the lowest incarceration rate. On the flip side, prison populations have been shooting up for years both in Maine and across the nation. Magnusson says he "never saw this coming" -- the huge increase in Maine's prison population and the resulting strains, including overcrowing in just about every facility. The incarceration rate in the state has more than doubled in the past 25 years. For the population increase, Magnusson largely blames mid-1990s changes in the sentencing laws and district attorneys who got plea bargains that sent prisoners to the state prison instead of to the congested county jails.

The Problems Run Deep

The obstacles to prison reform are hardly Maine-specific. Most profoundly, they lie in the human psyche on the battleground between revenge and forgiveness, between hope and pessimism. Global opinion condemns the US for capital punishment (though Maine doesn't have it), the nation's highest-in-the-world incarceration rate, and its supermaxes.

Many criminologists say the supermaxes and the prison system as a whole are demonstrably counterproductive, if one assumes the goal is to return prisoners who won't commit crimes again to society. The high recidivism rate proves this, they say; the exiting convicts are not being "corrected" or reformed.

Arguably, the prison system is a success on another level, suggests sociologist and Bowdoin Dean McEwen: the crime-rate may be going down in the US because 2.3 million of the most likely crime-doers are locked up -- the number continues to climb each year -- and the supermaxes "work" in a sense because they remove disruptive people from the general prison population.

But most citizens would prefer that the 90 percent of inmates coming out of prison don't continue their criminal activity. And "there's a strong line of evidence and argument that punitive responses are not likely to be effective as deterrents" to the bad actions of prisoners or released prisoners, McEwean says.

Torture Conference At Colby College

Colby College in Waterville will host an international conference, "Torture and Human Rights: The Challenge of Redress and Rehabilitation," on Saturday, November 19. Beatrice Mtetwa, a human-rights attorney from Zimbabwe, will give the lunch keynote address. A workshop entitled "New Tactics in Human Rights" will "provide practical skills for combating human rights abuses." Torture survivors, lawyers, scholars, and others will make up several panels.

The conference is open and free to the public. It's sponsored by Colby's Oak Institute for Human Rights. For more information, check out www.colby.edu/oak

Another penal expert in Maine concurs, and he has more than academic expertise with the prison system. Peter Lehman, who has a doctorate in sociology and who formerly taught criminology at the University of Southern Maine, is himself on probation after spending five years at the former Maine State Prison, in Thomaston, and the nearby prison farm. Lehman was convicted, in 1998, of taking sexual photographs of four girls, aged 12 to 15, and having sex with a 15-year-old.

Talking with Lehman on the phone, I am struck by his extraordinary combination of practical and scholarly insights. I suggest we meet, which we do in an Augusta coffee shop.

He is a diminutive, bearded 60-year-old. He lives in the mid-coast and is trying to earn a living as an entrepreneur. The Internet-posted state registry of sex offenders makes earning a living difficult.

"I'll never get a job," he says.

He tends to become professorial when talking about his expertise.

"Most crimes are expressive, not instrumental," he asserts, using sociological terms. What he means is that it is an emotion, such as rage or fear, or the high of an addictive behavior, that drives many people to commit crimes, both outside of and within prison -- and not the calculation of benefits, not the view of the crime as a means to an end.

"Have you ever slammed a door when you're angry or frustrated?" he asks. "It feels good. It's not instrumental, but expressive."

He calls the Supermax "simply one end of a continuum in the prison system." How to stop Supermax inmates from throwing urine and feces? The "prison thinks the way to deal with that is punishment," Lehman says, "but [the inmate's action] is not a calculated, rational decision. This is an expression of rage."

Lehman believes prisons breed antisocial behavior: "Say an inmate borrows a magazine or a CD from someone else. One of the rules is 'no giving or receiving.' If person A is caught with B's CD and the officer wants to push it, both are subject to disciplinary action. People can actually lose [good] time for that. It could mean that you could lose privileges. You could actually lose your job or get sent to the Supermax."

He continues: "Now most of us as human beings would think it's a virtue to loan something to somebody to help them out." But in prison, this social behavior is penalized.

Despite these antisocial rules, Lehman says, "one of the most amazing things is how much [inmates] risk punishment to help each other. . . . But to be generous they have to lie, pretend, sneak around.

"Incarceration creates a situation where all of the kinds of issues that you have are very typically heightened -- trauma, degradation, lack of a sense of self. I'm not sure that I met more than a handful of men in prison who didn't have a trauma history. Prison deepens these kinds of issues and wounds.

"There is an arbitrariness about discipline. The rules are such that it is virtually impossible to avoid a situation where anybody can get busted at any time." Most guards mean well, he says, but they are stuck in a bad system.

McEwen agrees with Lehman's view that crime is mostly expressive. And he thinks Lehman's description of how the prison rewards antisocial behavior is "a great insight." The Supermax was basically designed to prevent cooperative behavior, McEwen says. By isolating people, supermaxes "don't socialize people to get along with each other."

Do We Want To Change Things?

The more cynical prisoners and civilians will tell you the prison "industry" is a big business that thrives on crime, recidivism, and severe, counterproductive punishment, as evidenced by the enormous prison building boom of the past 20 years, by the growth of large private prison corporations nationally (there are no private prisons in Maine), and by strong guard unions that contribute to politicians' campaign treasuries. There are many salaries and careers tied up in the caretaking of prisoners.

"Recidivism is money in the bank" for this industry, Supermax prisoner Deane Browne tells me.

Even the less cynical among political observers would tend to place government corrections budgets, like the budgets for the mentally ill, far down the funding-priority ladder.

And everyone to whom I asked the question agreed prisons are dumping grounds for the mentally ill.

"That's true of every [correctional] system," says Denise Lord, the associate corrections commissioner. Some estimates of the recidivism of mentally ill prisoners are as high as 80 percent. The state corrections department estimates that 85 percent of inmates in its system have mental illness or substance-abuse problems. Lord says that 40 percent of the state prison's inmates are on psychotropic drugs.

She also says Maine has a greater percentage of mentally ill prisoners than any other state. In chorus, both Commissioner Magnusson and Lord emphatically say they want to put more mentally ill prisoners into mental health facilities -- but there is no room for them because the beds at these facilities are all full.

It is almost a given in political circles that the public and its legislators are callous about what happens in the prisons -- though they are concerned about crime, especially when a notorious crime occurs and politicians can make hay over it.

"Society is ignorant of this stuff because they don't want to hear [about it]," says Chuck Limanni, a Supermax prisoner I interviewed, about prison abuse. "They don't realize this stuff is hurting them, too. The majority in here are getting out. Most of the time they're worse off than they were, and they create more harm. They learn to hate."

He adds: "While being punished, it would be good to learn a skill." Limanni says that the last time he was out of prison, he and his girlfriend had a $1300-a-day cocaine habit that needed to be fed, and for many addicts the only way to do it is to steal.

Bowdoin sociologist Craig McEwen comments on "the politicization of crime, fed by the media. We demonize certain types of criminal activity, reinforcing the notion that more punishment is better -- the language of 'toughness on crime' . . . it's politically profitable."

In analyzing "tough on crime" attitudes, both doctors McEwen and Lehman speak of "moral panics," which, according to one dictionary definition, is "a mass movement based on the false or exaggerated perception that some individual or group . . . is dangerously deviant and poses a menace to society. Moral panics are generally fueled by media coverage of social issues."

The relationship of legislation to moral panics is close, McEwen says. In the sociological community, "there is a good deal of agreement on the political momentum that builds from one or two well-publicized cases." He mentions the first President Bush's notorious "Willie Horton" TV ad from the 1988 presidential campaign that drove many state legislatures to wipe out parole for convicts. After one little girl was killed in a brutal way in New Jersey, states instituted "Megan's Law" sex-offender registries.

Even the Department of Corrections seems to agree, at least in part, with the moral-panic problem. Both Magnusson and Lord express concern about legislators in the coming session leading a charge to invent new crimes or establish tougher penalties for crimes -- arising, for example, from a trucker involved in a fatal accident while driving after license suspension. Or from national news about identity theft or methamphetamine manufacture.

But lack of concern may be a bigger obstacle to prison reform than panic is. Senator Bill Diamond, the Democrat from Windham who is chair of the state's Criminal Justice and Public Safety Committee which oversees the state correctional system, has not had any problems expressed to him about mentally ill prisoners in the Supermax, he says in a phone interview.

There is a problem with funding, however, for the prison, he says. The Legislature required an extra $1.5-million cut in the corrections budget in the last session, he explains, and "I suspect there are funding deficiencies in all their areas." His party controls the Legislature.

Diamond, who has worked as a lobbyist for the Elan School, the Poland Spring facility that puts troubled young people through controversial therapy (it was investigated by the state in 2002 for alleged abuse of its clients) agrees that "there is not a lot of support" from the public for prison funding: "People have other priorities" -- such as, at the moment, he says, how to heat their homes when fuel-oil prices are sky-high. He did not seem terribly interested in the subject of Supermax abuse.

The Solution To The Supermax Problem?

There are lots of things critics of the correctional system, including Commissioner Magnusson, say could be done to end what some people see as abuse or torture at the Supermax, and many of these ideas could apply to reform of the entire prison system: have more therapy and less punishment; make corrections more community-based; provide more pay for better-trained guards; stop putting mentally ill people in prison; give prisoners incentive to work their way out of the Supermax.

To solve the prison "problem" and the worst part of it, the Supermax, Peter Lehman believes, "We have to accept the fact that these are also social issues, not just individual ones. . . . We are unique [in the world] in refusing healing and redemption."

Does punishment not work, I ask Commissioner Magnusson point-blank?

"I would agree with that," he replies.

If Magnusson is right, the more therapeutic and compassionate practices at the Long Creek Youth Developmental Center show the way.

"If they re-thought, it would be a brilliant stroke," says McEwen of the state's corrections department -- especially, he believes, if the Supermax could be shut down.

"They could take real leadership nationally."

So now we have Commissioner Martin Magnusson, prisoner Chuck Limanni, former sociologist and inmate Peter Lehman, and Bowdoin College dean and sociologist Craig McEwen agreeing that punishment doesn't work.

Perhaps they ought to be on a committee to reform the Supermax.

Lance Tapley can be reached at ltapley@prexar.com

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