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A Suspicious (and Lonely) Death in Maine State Prison’s Lockdown Unit
Solitary Watch Guest Post by Stan Moody
Solitary Watch Editors’ note: Our first guest post on Solitary Watch News is by Stan Moody, a former state representative and chaplain at the Maine State Prison, where he ministered to inmates in the supermax unit. Moody, who currently serves as pastor at the Meeting House Church in Manchester, Maine, is the author of the books Crisis in Evangelical Scholarship and McChurched: 300 Million Served and Still Hungry. In February, Moody testified at a hearing in the Maine State Legislature on a proposed bill to limit solitary confinement in the state’s prisons. As part of his testimony, he told the story of a prisoner who died alone in his segregation cell; he tells the same story, in more detail, in this guest post. More of Moody’s writings can be found at http://www.stanmoody.com.
I wrote this article on St. Valentine’s Day, a day that conjures up a wide range of experiences, from first love to the famous massacre on February 14, 1929...
There are 4,000 or more people incarcerated in Maine at the moment. Keeping watch over them are hundreds of prison guards, most of whom would rather be home than spending love’s holiday doing cavity search or bed counts. Happy Valentine’s Day!
There is a widow in upstate NY who reels from a double-whammy of a brilliant, successful husband who confessed to a sexual assault and the memory of his ashes arriving 6 months later from Maine State Prison (MSP) with the notice that he had died of "natural causes." Then another whammy–finding out 6 weeks later, after she had buried him, that it was a homicide and that prison officials had known as much within minutes of his death–officially, within 2 days.
There are others who come to mind who are reeling, as well, from conflict over what to do about this situation that, if brought into the light, will explode into a full-blown crisis. Maine Department of Corrections officials are on pins and needles, wondering what is going to happen when this explodes. I was scheduled to give testimony on the conditions at the supermax unit at MSP that I feel gave rise to the death of inmate Sheldon Weinstein, a prospect that threw a wrench into my Valentine’s Day.
I have a picture in my mind of the Attorney General’s Office vainly searching for a good option to prosecute somebody for this death without smearing the prison system. It has been nearly 10 months since Weinstein died alone in his cell of a ruptured spleen presumed to have been caused by an inmate assault 4 days earlier. It is not as though they had to go looking for a suspect or that the evidence was scattered over 50 states. Nobody was going anywhere. Justice is slow and nearly blind, but it gets slower and blinder when a state agency is implicated.
It is easier to digest this story if we can somehow de-humanize people caught up in the meat grinder we call justice–guards and prisoners alike. Whether you like it or not, however, all players in the justice drama are human beings, Weinstein included. It is that very humanity that cries out for reform of the efficient, military, detached environment that we call Maine State Prison.
It may be time for me to share my story.
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