Met with Maine's new Corrections Commissioner Joe Ponte for 90 minutes Tuesday. He's from Away, like the new Maine prison warden Patty Barnhart. He understands he is perched atop an agency still firmly in the grip of an Old Boys' Club of corruptos troughing at DOC's cashflow, and that he has arrived just in time to defend the Dept of Corrections budget before the Legislature.
So what is Ponte selling us? Trimming entrenched fat from the Department of Corrections budget while as yet barely knowing the players in the department must be tough. Keep your hands off my stack! is surely what each of his subchiefs advises when he consults them. And knowing that the OBC chorus can block his every reform effort if it chooses. He could be a reformer. In photo, Ponte hamming it up at a CCA prison cafeteria
On inmate exile? He agrees a case by case review is necessary. Is noncommittal on LD 690 since the first time he'd seen the bill was when I handed it to him at the meeting! (Its only one page Happy news for an official whose inbox must look like Mt Katahdin.)
He's spending this week with the guards, walking the pods in Warren for the first time WITHOUT the prison brass present. - Guards get s**t upon by the Club if they don't join in their secret racketeering. An account by a retiring Maine prison guard richly illustrates the obstacles the old boys club have created to reform. This document is the one that got the Maine inmate correspondent of a Maine Community radio news show exiled to high security prisons, first in Baltimore, MD, then Western Maryland and now Trenton NJ. Punished by the old boys for getting them in trouble. Six years in exile prisons so far...and counting.
There were three other prison reformers there at the meeting; Ponte had no staff with him, there in his office in the funky old former state mental institution that overlooks the Kennebec River, though the door was open to the room where the top cubicle types are, and doubtless many ears were tuning in.
So what is Ponte selling us? Trimming entrenched fat from the Department of Corrections budget while as yet barely knowing the players in the department must be tough. Keep your hands off my stack! is surely what each of his subchiefs advises when he consults them. And knowing that the OBC chorus can block his every reform effort if it chooses. He could be a reformer. In photo, Ponte hamming it up at a CCA prison cafeteriaOn inmate exile? He agrees a case by case review is necessary. Is noncommittal on LD 690 since the first time he'd seen the bill was when I handed it to him at the meeting! (Its only one page Happy news for an official whose inbox must look like Mt Katahdin.)
He's spending this week with the guards, walking the pods in Warren for the first time WITHOUT the prison brass present. - Guards get s**t upon by the Club if they don't join in their secret racketeering. An account by a retiring Maine prison guard richly illustrates the obstacles the old boys club have created to reform. This document is the one that got the Maine inmate correspondent of a Maine Community radio news show exiled to high security prisons, first in Baltimore, MD, then Western Maryland and now Trenton NJ. Punished by the old boys for getting them in trouble. Six years in exile prisons so far...and counting.
There were three other prison reformers there at the meeting; Ponte had no staff with him, there in his office in the funky old former state mental institution that overlooks the Kennebec River, though the door was open to the room where the top cubicle types are, and doubtless many ears were tuning in.
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