News & Commentary

LD 1611- Reducing and Regulating the Use of Solitary Confinement in Maine Prisons - the time is now!!

The public hearing and work session on the bill to limit and reduce solitary confinement (LD 1611) has been many things - inspiring, disheartening, invigorating, frustrating, empowering, and, often, very sad. “It’s an awful thing, solitary,” U.S. Senator John McCain once wrote of his two years spent in a fifteen by 15-foot prison cell in Viet Nam. “It crushes your spirit and weakens your resistance more effectively than any other form of mistreatment.” One moment of the hearing I that particularly moved me, was the brief testimony from one mother of a prisoner, currently being held in the Secure Management Unit that is the focus of the bill. In these units, men and women are held in a small cell, for around 23 hours each day, with 1 hour per day to recreate, outdoors, alone, in a cage, and for sporadic, non-contact visits with family and attorneys. The woman told us how she decided to close herself in her bathroom for 23 hours with 3 books and 3 meals to experience what her son was going through. Her voice broke as she shared how difficult it was to be alone even for 1 day. We have the chance, right now in Maine, to make enact meaningful limitations and oversight to this extreme practice. CONTACT your Representative and Senator to tell them to support LD 1611's limits and oversight. LD 1611:

February 27, 2010

The woman told us how she decided to close herself in her bathroom for 23 hours with 3 books and 3 meals to experience what her son was going through. Her voice broke as she shared how difficult it was to be alone even for 1 day. We have the chance, right now in Maine, to make enact meaningful limitations and oversight to this extreme practice. CONTACT your Representative and Senator to tell them to support LD 1611's limits and oversight. LD 1611:

Creates a more safe, humane and secure prison for prisoners, officers, and Maine communities, by reducing violence and recidivism, both inside and outside the prison walls.
Caps the use of segregation to 45 days with the exception of certain conditions (completed or attempted acts of serious violence, escape, or sexual assault, or determination of immediate security risk)
Bans the placement of seriously mentally ill prisoners in segregation, and requires that prisoners who begin to exhibit serious mental illness while isolated be removed from the segregation.
Insures due process by enshrining in law fair and meaningful hearings, reviews and oversight.

“I found solitary confinement the most forbidding aspect of prison life. There is no end and no beginning; there is only one’s mind, which can begin to play tricks. Was that a dream or did it really happen? One begins to question everything.”
–Nelson Mandela, from his 1994 autobiography The Long Walk to Freedom

To CONTACT MEMBERS OF THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE COMMITTEE

Thank LD 1611 Sponsor (and member of the Committee)

Rep. Jim Schatz

[email protected]

Senator Stan Gerzofsky (Senate Chair)
3 Federal Street,

Brunswick, ME 04011

207-373-1328

[email protected]

Representative Anne Haskell

(House Chair)

31 Higgins Street

Portland, ME 04103