1.

US popular culture often proudly makes reference to the Judeo-Christian traditions so

prominent in US history, yet “Get tough on crime,” is still the winning political slogan of
the day. How did society come to view incarceration as a social good, as something
necessary to keep society safe?

First, we have ghettoized ourselves into white, suburban group-think

that builds on self-righteousness…We are probably the most self-righteous
nation on earth, which precludes us from contemplating, “There but for the
grace of God, go I.”…Tragically, the greatest social good in America has
become the acquisition of wealth through “legitimate” means such as self
promotion and corporate empire building, where greed becomes an
acceptable vertue…Those who take shortcuts to the American Dream are
pariahs to be banished from the kingdom of us pedestrian wannabees who,
in frustration, quietly cheat on our taxes and on our spouses…
Four years ago, I published a book titled, “McChurched: 300 Million
Served and Still Hungry.” I was a Maine State Legislator at the time…The
book, an attack on the encroachment of the Christian Right into American
politics, came out on the heels of my public advocacy for equal rights for
gays and lesbians, a rather unusual stance these days for an evangelical
Baptist minister…A key point in my book was that Christians whose dogma is
the Old Testament ethic of “eye for an eye” have dismissed Jesus’ Sermon
on the Mount and His message of the liberating presence of the Kingdom of
God...
I went so far as to describe these Old Testament Christians as
“Christian Atheists” – people who depend on the presumed power of the
Sinner’s Prayer to save their souls but deny the sovereignty of the God they
profess to worship…They look to Jesus as their ticket to heaven but to
themselves to manipulate events here on earth to force God’s hand in
cleaning up the mess we seem to have created…
Jesus, on the other hand, makes it clear that His followers are to love
their enemies, do good to those who hate them, leave vengeance and
retribution up to God and visit Him in prison…“Inasmuch as you have or have
not done it to the least of these my brothers, you have or have not done it to
me.”
A cursory examination of our nation’s history will satisfy that the
founders had no Christian theocracy in mind and, in fact, crafted a document
that expressly ensured otherwise…Yet, people who advocate for the
theocratic view are not listening…The best evidence that we are a pagan and
not a Christian nation is not in the actions of government but in the actions
of our erstwhile evangelical state church that has embraced the Republican
Party as God’s instrument for redemption…The vehicle for that redemption is
a moral code rather than divine grace…Getting tough on crime is just
another version of an anti-Christian moral code…
Incarceration as a social good comes from a failed Old Testament
theocratic ethic…Through the person and work of Christ, we have been given
direct access into God’s presence…The line of demarcation between God’s

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world and that of Caesar’s has been made clear, distinct and inviolable…The
Kingdom of God becomes the primary citizenship for the Christian, from
where we are encouraged to look on others more favorably than ourselves…
The Kingdom of God is the place where racial, ethnic, gender, social and
economic lines are obliterated…Prisoners, then, become garden variety
sinners no different from the rest of us…As do we all, they pay a price for
their sin…The good news ought to be the capacity to be free even within a
prison… “Lock them up and throw away the key” may well be prevalent in
our culture, but the Christian has no business being an echo chamber for
such demonic thinking…
Old Testament theology is fear-based…Christian living is intended to
be above the fear line…America, on the other hand, is a fear-driven culture
that intends to protect itself with military power and select moral codes…The
more things change, the more they seem to stay the same…

2. -Why do you suppose prisons and prisoners’ living conditions are so far removed from
the popular US consciousness today? How do US popular culture and the corporate
media present the issue of human rights in prison?

Very simply, as the nation with by far the highest incarceration rate in the world, neither
the public nor the mainstream news media wants to know anything about prisons…Prisons are
the depositories of our social programming and education failures…“Get them out of our sight.”
The ultimate driver is cost…Only as the public becomes aware of the enormous cost of the
revolving door of incarceration will they begin to pay attention to what is going on inside and
how we might change the dynamic…Corrections has taken full advantage of this denial by
essentially saying, “You cannot possibly understand what we are up against.” They have built
incarceration into a growth industry that is sapping our national strength and shredding our
decency…
There is a shroud of secrecy that envelops prisons…That shroud of secrecy is protected
through a system of nepotism, patronage and public ignorance and apathy…The public thinks of
prisons as country clubs, while they are, in fact, crushingly boring places within high-tech boxes
designed more for mass movement than rehabilitation…The human element has tragically been
removed from most US prisons by a public frustrated in pursuit of its own dreams, thereby
advocating for crushing the spirits of those getting what they enviously consider to be a “free
ride.”…
Both the mainstream press and the public it entertains are too pedestrian for relevancy in
this volatile world in which we live…

3. -How can people of faith shed light on human rights abuses in prisons?

The best answer is to challenge the comfort zones of your denomination, the media, your
friends and neighbors and your political leaders…Write, speak and live out your faith on the
front lines of activism for human dignity, especially when it disturbs your comfort zone…Only
through patient suffering can you convince others of the legitimacy of your beliefs…

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 Belief in the power of God to move mountains by touching one life will drive people of
faith toward little victories, knowing they are cumulative…While Christian volunteers in prisons
are legion, they scatter to the four winds when the subject of human rights is raised…As a
Chaplain at Maine State Prison, I sometimes was criticized by management for not sticking to
“Chaplain things,” meaning administrative and counseling duties…There was hardly a single
volunteer who joined with me once I stood up for Sheldon Weinstein, who died of a ruptured
spleen in segregation on April 24, 2009, a couple of hours after I requested a roll of toilet paper
for him…He had been using his pillow case; he had no pillow anyway…
I speak as a Christians, believing that the willingness to sacrifice one’s own comforts in
defense of the human rights of those in exile among us is the best barometer of the legitimacy of
faith… “Touching a life” rarely brings press coverage, but it may well reap huge rewards in the
grand scheme to which people of faith must demonstrate devotion…
We must take great care, however, not to be caught up in embellished stories…If we
recognize our own need for redemption, we will see the whole person rather than his or her
crime…

4. Today, do you think that the practices of forced prison labor (recognized as legal slavery
by the 13th Amendment of the US Constitution) and solitary confinement have any
beneficial effects on the spiritual growth of people in prison? How has your outlook on
this question been influenced by what you witnessed first-hand, working as a Chaplain at
Maine’s maximum security state prison?

Dehumanization is the most debilitating punishment that can be imposed on another

human being…Prisoners are no exception…I can imagine a situation where prisoners are used
for the crudest labor but are valued as human beings – treated fairly and consistently…On the
other hand, I can imagine another situation where you have numbers of entrepreneurs in a prison
who are making very good money but are working under conditions of arbitrary patronage and
favoritism…Slavery does not always have to do with how much money you make…It may be
possible to learn something of the value of human life even in the harshest of conditions…
I found at Maine State Prison that the biggest impediment to spiritual growth was
idleness and lack of respect in work, in life and in interrelationships…Earn the right to clean the
toilets, if you will, or to pick cotton, or to work in the kitchen, but know that you are respected
for earning that right and will be respected for the kind of job you do and not because you are
somebody’s “kid.” Know that you are valued as a human being and that the administration is
always looking for a spark of hope to kindle…
I am reading “In the Place of Justice” by Wm. Rideau…It is interesting that the cotton
picking “slavery” at Angola seems to get far less space than the sexual slavery that stays beneath
the radar of the administration and destroys human dignity…

5. The Maine State Legislature recently passed a bill that focused on the
use of solitary confinement in Maine’s prisons. Initially, the bill sought
to limit the use of solitary confinement, but it was “seriously amended”
(to quote The Free Press: http://freepressonline.com/main.asp?
SectionID=52&SubSectionID=78&ArticleID=6059) to only call for
more scrutiny of how solitary confinement is used. What do you think
will be the impact of the bill, now that it has been watered-down?

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 As a former Maine State Legislator, I was very involved with this bill
and was the only former prison staff member to give testimony…The
Committee ignored our plea for transparency and accountability and,
instead, continued its blind, loyal support of the Department of Corrections,
the very institution it has been entrusted to oversee…
It is incorrect to view this bill as having been “seriously amended.”
The bill was killed with kindness by turning it into a resolve for the
Department to study itself…A resolve is what a legislative committee does to
kill a bill when it fears public uprising if it votes “ought not to pass.”
Legislative resolves are akin to patents with claims so narrow that you would
not infringe on them if you copied the design but changed the color…They
are not worth the paper they are written on…
Sadly for this case, the resolve showed a failure of courage on the part
of committee members on both sides of the aisle…The House and Senate
chairs failed their constituents and the State of Maine…
The good news is that with the upcoming legislative session to begin in
January, 2011, and with the election of a new Governor, there will be a bevy
of new prison bills to debate…I have personally spoken to 6 gubernatorial
candidates about the conditions at the Department of Corrections and the
Maine prisons system and expect that the next Governor will be far better
informed than previously…Further good news is that prison administration
immediately began to implement some of the advances contained the bill
after having expended their energies defending their previous policies,
indicating that they are aware of the battle ahead…
Prisoners who “were not supposed to be there” were put back into
population…Solitary confinement residents can now earn privileges such as
up to 4 hours daily outside their cells, normal prison garb instead of orange
jump suits, TV’s and radios and contact visits…Sadly, there has not yet been
a disposition with regard to those mentally ill prisoners held in solitary…

6. From the perspective of someone who has worked inside a prison as

well as in the Maine State House of Representatives, why do you think
that a stronger version of the bill was unable to be passed? Why did
government officials and prison authorities oppose it?

Corrections administrators in Maine have successfully sold the public

on the falsehood that nobody understands what they are up against…From
the Commissioner on down, with occasional exceptions, you have people
who have come up through the guard system rather than professionals
trained to be innovative in solving the larger problem of the waste of human
life…The Governor and legislative committee members, convinced that they
did not understand people convicted of crimes, consistently bowed to the
wisdom of the “old boy network.”

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 I recently intervened in a law suit by a former guard against the State
of Maine for the purpose of unsealing a deposition that offers a damning
picture of the inside politics of Maine State Prison…I was successful in doing
so and have studied it in its entirety…The closest I can come to describing it
is that it ought to be subject to a RICO (federal racketeering) investigation…
Over the next week or so, I expect to issue a public report…It is a fear-based
culture that adheres to secrecy at the expense of both staff and prisoners…
While there is very little skill in managing people, what distinguishes prison
management the most and is most endearing to politicians is the ability to
circle the wagons to put out fires…
The legislative committee of oversight has become an echo chamber
for the Department of Corrections…It exhibits the height of denial and
laziness to fail to listen to professionals who have put their personal
reputations on the line in the pursuit of truth…Why would they listen to such
people when it is their pattern of behavior to sacrifice their own integrity in
the pursuit of political gain?
We are not done…This bill was the best thing to come along for prison
reform in the history of the State for it showed the Department as the tired
old system it is – a 19th Century culture housed in a 21st Century box…We will
prevail, God willing, and we will see a day when our Corrections house is
cleaned from top to bottom...

Additional:

The Eastern State Penitentiary was torn down, I believe, in 1973…Most

of the prisons in the U.S. today, however, retain the Eastern State, 19th
Century Quaker culture that punishment builds character…It has survived
through a system of patronage and nepotism – getting rid of good staff
people in favor of the corrupt…The high tech boxes that we today call
prisons are designed to manage mass movement rather than to build
community and self respect, with punishment being arbitrary, inconsistent
and capricious in most cases, extended out of sheer boredom…
Prison staff believes and promotes the belief that they have dangerous
jobs…I ran some statistics on jobs in the US…Prison guards hardly surface…
At the top are commercial fishing and logging industries, both prominent in
Maine but rarely heard to complain about danger…It might interest the
readers to know that a prison guard has a lower death rate than do licensed
drivers – lower than 21 per 100,000 population…
Studies prove that re-entry programs begun in the inside and carried
over to the outside will cut recidivism rates by as much as 75%...Why, then,
are we not implementing those programs? I believe it is because Corrections
is protecting itself as a growth industry…It is only when the public begins to

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realize it is being fleeced will it demand change…Meanwhile, we the people
continue to elect arrogant obstructionists to public office in protection of the
status quo…