November 25, 2005
Wife of C.O. responds
Lance Tapley — I’m sure you didn’t leave from your interviews with these six inmates with their feces, or urine, or blood, or vomit on your clothes (see“Torture in Maine’s Prison,” November 11, and“Reforming the Supermax,” November 18). Probably none of them said they’d kill or rape you, your wife, or your kids, while you watch. Of course you didn’t. Prison guards hear it every day, several times daily, in fact. They work more than 12 hours a day, for minimal pay, with murderers, pedophiles, kidnappers, and rapists. These inmates were all on their very best behavior during your interviews, because they wanted something from you. One of the major points was the feces and urine. WHOSE IS IT? If they didn’t flood their toilets so there is an inch and a half of toilet water all over the floor, or if they didn’t save up their feces, urine, and blood, and throw it all over their only home, or at the guards, maybe it wouldn’t be everywhere. How is it that inmates have been exposed to feces in their cells if it’s flushed down the toilet? I know they have toilets.
Guards get ready each morning to go to work, to pay their bills. They brush their teeth, shave, and put their uniform on one leg at a time. When you come right down to it, these men take just as many, if not more, risks as any police officer. They are unarmed, but for mace, unless suited in their riot gear. They don’t put the cell numbers in a hat and pick one for extraction. The guards working at the Maine State Prison deal every day with the knowledge they are exposing themselves and their families to another world. They have to deal with the mental problems of these inmates, in which they have no training. They deal with people cutting themselves. This is a gruesome and bloody business. Not to mention AIDS and hepatitis.
Inmates are inmates for a reason. They seemed sane enough during your interviews to understand good behavior is rewarded. If all of the inmates wanted to they wouldn’t have to be in the maximum security level. If they are being uncooperative or sometimes overcome with rage, so much so that someone might get hurt, the inmate or the guard, there has to be consequences. Then, after years of not following the rules, they get deeper into the levels of the system. It’s not the guard’s fault they are there. A majority of theses inmates have graduated from the Maine Youth Center in years past and worked themselves up.
People I know have had to hold an inmate up, seconds after hanging himself, while another guard unties him, so they could try to save his life. This affects a normal person’s psyche.
I don’t think any profession has ever been so misrepresented in the media as this one. Every time they make the guard to be the bad guy. He didn’t put the guy in there. He wasn’t on the jury. The inmate broke the laws. Therefore, they gave up certain rights as human beings. This is the reason they are in jails, prisons and halfway houses.
Just this month I voted in my town on two separate bond issues. Both issues were throwing money at land conservation. It seems the governor would rather just deal with or delegate the negative than actually spend money on the problem. Some of these guys started at pay of $9 an hour. The governor’s been to the prison only once that I’ve heard of. If he’d spend the money, they would find the people to create the ways, the doctors to deal with the emotionally unstable, and you’d get guards with the equipment and training to do their jobs. I’d like to sign my name but I can’t for safety reasons.
NRT, Wife of a Maine Corrections Officer
Bath
December 2, 2005
Lance unfair to guards
Mr. Tapley, I felt compelled to write to you after reading your recent article in the Portland Phoenix (see “Torture in Maine’s Prison”, by Lance Tapley, November 11).
Your article troubled me a great deal. There were two reasons for this. The first is the picture you have painted of mentally ill prisoners who are not receiving adequate treatment. This is clearly a failure of our punitive system, possibly of our judicial system, and of our society as a whole because prisoners are not the only victims of inadequate mental health and regular health care. And clearly, it is an indisputable fact — even the warden was not prepared to deny it.
