Vital work is being done at state prison

It’s always a foreboding place, Maine State Prison (MSP) in Warren. Former MSP Warden Rod Bouffard described Maine’s maximum security prison as home to 900 of Maine’s most dangerous people. I suppose not much can be done to make this facility, surrounded by chain-link fence laced with razor wire, look more homey.

Wednesday, June 27, I returned to MSP for the first time in about two years. The only other times I visited this prison was as communications director for the Maine Department of Corrections (MDOC). In that time I visited all Maine’s adult and juvenile correctional facilities, getting to know facility administrators, staff, and many prisoners.

This week I was back at MSP for the Maine Hospice Council — MDOC “Addressing Personhood in Healthcare and Rehabilitation: An Ethical and Moral Imperative” joint conference. The conference title would never pass Rudolf Flesch’s Index to Simple Writing, but the topic presentations were excellent.

The essence of the health care point of view? Medical professionals need to get away from referring to “The gallbladder in Room 213”, and getting back to, “Mrs. Fitzgerald, who’s waiting in Room 213, is having issues with her gallbladder.”

The Maine Hospice Council is in its 17th year at MSP training prisoner volunteers to be hospice care workers. The prisoners, in turn, provide hospice care to terminally ill and dying prisoners at MSP. And this program served, at the conference, as an example of a prisoner rehabilitation program that’s clearly helping prisoners.

Maine, like the rest of the nation, is made up of people who believe prisoners who can be rehabilitated should be rehabilitated, and of people who believe the opposite: “Lock ’em up. Throw away the key.”

During my time as MDOC communications director, in addition to the hospice program, there were other successful correctional programs. The Maine Prison Woods Product Industry is probably the best known. And there were ongoing programs taught by correctional care and treatment workers and others, offering prisoners a way out of illiteracy, drug and/or alcohol addiction, and anger management.

Those three issues — illiteracy, addiction, anger — come up over and over within Maine’s correctional facilities.

Once I watched a mock Drug Court — presented like a stage play — at Maine Correctional Center in Windham. Inside a MCC meeting room, prisoners had constructed a courtroom with a Judge’s desk, jury box — the works. “Mr. Drugs” was on trial. The jury had to decide whether the prisoners sentenced there for drug crimes had only themselves to blame for getting involved with Mr. Drugs. Or whether Mr. Drugs was to blame for introducing himself to the prisoners.

Listening to testimony by these prisoners I was amazed to hear how many of them “met Mr. Drugs” before they were in their teens. “Some of them,” said this Drug Court director, “were addicts in utero.”

And I was also pained to hear a few twentysomething prisoners struggle to find words to complete a thought, or make a point. Even in the free world this level of illiteracy is a prison unto itself. I don’t know why these prisoners were illiterate, but I am glad the MDOC, at least, is offering a way out.

The MCC Drug Court prisoners, serving as jurors, found the prisoners mostly responsible for getting involved with Mr. Drugs. With Mr. Drugs somewhat responsible for being available to the prisoners.

At the conference on Wednesday, MSP Warden Randall Liberty said, “We believe in redemption. Program, not punish.” Alluding to correctional facilities run from a different perspective, Warden Liberty said, “If you’re leading something and no one is behind you — you’re just taking a walk.”

Scott K. Fish has served as a communications staffer for Maine Senate and House Republican caucuses, and was communications director for Senate President Kevin Raye. He founded and edited AsMaineGoes.com and served as director of communications/public relations for Maine’s Department of Corrections until 2015. He is now using his communications skills to serve clients in the private sector.