News & Commentary

Today was one of those days when I would have liked to clone myself.  The morning started with a tough choice between monitoring the House vote on Fourth Amendment rights of ATV riders in Augusta or participating in a fascinating discussion of personal health records with the Consumer Advisory Committee to HealthInfoNet.  Alysia headed to Augusta, and I went to the AARP for the health in

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Unless there's a reason for the police to arrest you, you're released to go on your way.  It's what the NYPD has been doing for the past six years through a policy called stop-and-frisk.  According to police statistics, nearly 2.8 million people have been subjected to it.  What's both interesting and scary is that the NYPD has documented every instance that stop-and-frisk was carried out.  Therefore we know how many people were stopped, for what reason, and their race.  The last factor is most important.  The statistics reveal that white people need not fear an embarrassing frisk on a New York sidewalk anytime soon. Not only are most of the people stopped innocent, they are overwhelmingly either black or Hispanic.  Now it actually gets worse.  The NYPD is keeping all information about the stop on file in a database regardless of whether you were arrested or issued a summons.    And they intend on keeping that information "for use in future investigations".  So innocent people are being stopped, identified, and catalogued with the anticipation that sometime in the future they will be suspects. The NYCLU has been raising objections to the stop-and-frisk policy and the data retention. New York Times columnist Bob Herbert, cuts to the heart of the issue.  If middle class and affluent white people were being victimized in this way, the stop-and-frisk and data retention policies would be inexcusable.  But since the victims are poor and minorities, it's quietly accepted.  

A few weeks ago, I blogged on a story from Iowa that shocked me: police investigated and detained a woman for 2 days because she fell down the stairs while pregnant, and they suspected that she did so intentionally in order to indu

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:

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