Maine news, sports, weather | Kennebec Journal, Augusta, Maine

Not nameless inmates, but our neighbors

Stan Moody of Manchester, a former state represent

I watched the facial expressions of legislators while I testified on Maine's Solitary Confinement bill, LD1611, and it was clear that they were struggling with how to rephrase their staid corrections mentality in the face of mounting evidence of its failure of logic and common sense.

Meanwhile, it is becoming increasingly possible that every person reading this article has known or maybe been closely associated with a felon.

In less than a month after becoming a chaplain at Maine State Prison, I discovered, to my surprise, that I knew several prisoners there.

Two of them I had known since they were about 10 years old. One had been raised near my home in an upscale professional neighborhood in Portland. He had worn a path from his back door to ours over the years.

Why did I not know what had happened to him?

The blunt fact is that, like too many other suburbanites, I was so busy with my own life that I really didn't care. His presence within that prison is a constant reminder to me of my own failure as a friend and neighbor.

At the legislative work session on the bill, several committee members repeated a rehearsed mantra, "What about the victims?" Apparently, if they demonstrate concern for basic civil rights for prisoners whose own families are paying a severe price for their crimes, they betray the people they have damaged.

I hate to break this to you, but crime is our -- the public's -- problem. In Maine, we spend $40,000 per year to keep offenders out of sight, sentenced under an Elizabethan system that believes that punishment builds character.

At any one time, about 13 percent of prisoners at the Maine State Prison are in segregation -- the same number employed in the Prison Industries Program that produces knickknacks for the prison store in Thomaston.

It is likely that more than 50 percent have been in segregation at least once during their incarceration. It is the New Age way of keeping an overcrowded prison under control.

The keepers of the prison gate are more neighbors. Some are there by the curious twists and turns of fate. Others are there because they have a fascination with police culture. A number have higher education; most have high school diplomas; some have GEDs. Some even have criminal records, I was told by a private investigator.

Interestingly, legislators who think they represent a state of vigilantes, not the general public, are cramming our prisons full of drug offenders, drunken drivers, three-time losers and shoplifters -- 60 percent of whom are destined to be imprisoned for the same offenses within two years.

The public, however, is receptive to such preventive measures as intervention in parenting and better drug treatment programs, except, of course, for sex offenders, rapists and gruesome murderers, when hard labor is the lightest punishment they think is appropriate.

My college professor son was out for a late-night walk in his South Carolina neighborhood a couple of weeks ago. He was hit by car driven by a young woman and was thrown up over the hood, where he smashed her windshield, before being left for dead on the side of the road.

A half-hour later, he regained consciousness and lurched from mailbox to mailbox back to his home. From there, he went to the hospital and had surgery.

Neighbors apparently saw him lurching along the street badly hurt, but instead assumed he was a drunk and pulled their curtains shut, making him a victim of law-and-order hysteria.

Legislators who puff themselves up as protectors of society are negligently cutting off alternative sentencing for non-violent crimes and threatening transfer to private prisons with their three meals a day of peanut butter sandwiches.

I would like to know how much drug and alcohol treatment and sex offender rehabilitation you might get for $40,000 a year per person, while perhaps generating enough income to offer appropriate victim compensation.

We are all in it together, folks. Rage, impulse, anger and escape from reality infect us all to one degree or another. What ever happened to, "There, but for the grace of God, go I"?

Neighbor-to-neighbor, is this really the best we can do?

Stan Moody of Manchester, a former state representative and chaplain at the Maine State Prison, is the author of "Crisis in Evangelical Scholarship" and "McChurched: 300 Million Served and Still Hungry." He is pastor at the Meeting House Church in Manchester and is a frequent speaker on social justice issues. His Web site is www.stanmoody.com