Stan Moody

The private prison industry has its sights set on the exploding illegal immigration market...A bill in Maine would back door Arizona's dream law and move detainees to the inaccessible town of Milo, ME in exchange for shipping Maine prisoners out-of-state...The winner, of course, would be Corrections Corporation of America...The losers would be family members of non-violent Maine prisoners...

Whatever it is about right wing politicians that drives them to develop lists of their enemies, a Maine State legislator has taken lists to an art form...Following on the heels of a bill to create a registry for animal abusers, Rep. Richard Cebra seeks to create a list of OUI offenders...Along with a bill to permit concealed weapons within the State House and a bill to nullify Federal laws, Cebra has distinguished himself...

Prison reform advocates tend to focus on individual human rights cases and leave behind the systemic problems that created and sustain those abuses...Dr. Boyce Watkins suggests that while high profile cases like the Scott Sisters are compelling, we should never lose sight of the big picture...As an example, he suggests that the release of the Scott Sisters took the Georgia Prison Strike off the front page...

As we get closer to the 2012 elections, prison reform will be on the agenda due to escalating budgetary and human dignity costs...The problem with prison reform as a political issue, however, is that it cannot be solved with a sound bite...Prison rape is symtomatic of the shroud of secrecy that shields prisons from public view...Evangelicals and social activists, as strange cell-fellows, are working together to address this problem...

We are an angry, volatile nation that dispatches justice with the same production-line efficiency exhibited in the abortion industry. Meanwhile, those most eager to meter the death penalty to the vilest of offenders are pro-life Christians. Go figure!

Wiser staff members at Maine State Prison in Warren insisted that the only path to change was new blood from the top down...New Commissioner Ponte is wasting no time chopping heads and restructuring...And he is doing it alone...

Joe Ponte has been a very successful prison warden but never a commissioner...We suspect that he is feeling a bit of nervous restraint right now by moving into the political realm...Initial indications are unsettling - too much emphasis on retirement and not enough on wrestling that booger to the ground!

State legislators continue to bend to the will of constituents who stereotype sex offenders as some sleazy-looking male hiding in the bushes in a shool yard...They want to prohibit a sex offender from living within 2,500 feet of a school or day care center...In fact, the common profile of a sex offender is a person who looks, acts and lives like us!

Politicians are so consumed with fear over public backlash for doing something bold that they leave a lot of human suffering in their wake...The judge in the murder trial of Jeff Libby gave him 60 years for murdering his grandfather - 10 more than asked for by the prosecution...The Governor of Maine refused to permit him a clemency hearing until he had served 50% of his sentence, even though we now know he was sexually molested by a priest...

Prison officials have tried, with only minimal success, to muzzle chaplains who advocate for human rights...This is the story of two chaplains separated by hundreds of miles but attempting to remain true to their convictions in a culture in which professionals are balancing their own good against a demand for conscience...It is a losing battle, as prisons tighten the leaks to an increasingly informed public...