NEWSBYSTAN MOODY

My first real encounter with Jim Crow in the South came in 1963, when I'd just been accepted as a law student at George Washington University.  I was thrilled. Imagine my excitement as I drove our little family car from our home in New York down to DC. As I recall, the main highway ended in New Jersey, and from there on out I followed Route 1, which runs all the way down to Key West, Florida.

I'd known what Route 1 looked like in the North. But that same road in the South was a wakeup call.

The road was narrow and dirty. And soon enough, little hand-lettered signs on local storefronts began to appear: Colored Served in Rear, Rest Rooms, White Only. Drinking Fountain, White/Colored.

For a lad originally from Maine, the whitest state in the nation, I was shocked, and immediately felt the bile rising up in me. (That same emotion would later lead me to protest the whites-only policies of the Southern Baptist Convention.)

Of course, it wasn't just roadside signs that marked the presence of Jim Crow. As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. noted, such segregation infiltrated prisons, as well. One Mississippi law, for example, declared, The warden shall see that the white convicts shall have separate apartments for both eating and sleeping from the negro convicts.

What do you think the most dangerous job in America is? If you answered 'being a prison guard,' you'd be wrong. Though the corrections industry has sold the public on the danger of being a prison guard, the truth is that prisons are crushingly boring places.

That's because they're designed to be efficient, unchanging systems that maintain order while both staff and prisoners do their time. (That might explain prison guards' high rate of addiction and divorce.)

I should know — until recently, I worked as a chaplain in a Maine prison.

During a recent interview, I was asked if I thought the spate of deaths within Maine's solitary prison cells (three within the past year) would prompt future reforms. My answer was a categorical “No.” Unfortunately, the public has already spoken. Mental hospitals have largely been closed, leaving psychiatric wards, jails and prisons as the remaining option for many in need. Meanwhile, thanks to urban renewal, those without mental, financial or family resources to defend themselves have been rendered disposable.

Jeffrey Perry wants you to make him a Massachusetts Congressman. The former cop is running for the seat lately vacated by Rep. William Delahunt — and unfortunately, he's also running from a seriously scandalous past.

In the early 1990s, State Representative Jeffrey Perry was a police sergeant in Wareham, MA. According to a recent Boston Globe story, during that period of his career, he participated in two illegal strip searches of teenage girls. Back in 1991, when Perry and another officer questioned a 14-year-old girl while searching for drugs, they ordered her to unbutton her pants and reportedly groped her in the glare of police spotlights. The following year, it happened again, when another officer tried to strip search a 16-year-old girl in Perry's presence (he was stopped only when a civilian witness demanded the officer's badge number). No drugs were found in either case.

When Perry and his fellow officer went to inform the parents of the 16-year-old about what had happened, according to sworn testimony, Perry told the parents on his way out the door, “Oh, by the way, (she) pulled her pants down for us.” He does not deny making that statement. However, because the other officer had reportedly taken the young girl behind a dumpster before attempting to strip her — out of Perry’s direct line of sight — a law suit filed against Perry by the parents was later dismissed. Perry settled the civil case brought by the 14-year-old girl, while the other officer involved pleaded guilty to indecent assault. (He was sentenced to four years in prison and now lives out of state.)

Perry denies that he witnessed the searches and continues to insist that he did nothing inappropriate. He did, however, resign from the Wareham Police Department within six months of the incident with the 16-year-old. And now, he's running for Congress. Amazingly, Perry has already secured the endorsement of Sen. Scott Brown and former governor Mitt Romney. Surely, Sarah Palin cannot be far behind?

There is no pretty way to execute someone. No matter how sophisticated we get, capital punishment is an ugly thing — one that from time to time tends to go horrifically awry.

My home state of Maine abolished the death penalty in 1887, two years after the badly botched execution of Daniel Wilkinson on Nov. 21, 1885. Wilkinson — the last person to be executed in Maine — had been convicted on murder charges after shooting a constable after a foiled burglary attempt. His death was....let's put it this way, untidy. As the state tried to hang him, something went wrong with the noose. Wilkinson wriggled there on the rope for 15 minutes before ultimately strangling to death. His last words to the Sheriff? “You fellas get $50 a day for such work!”

Now, many decades later, Maine has discovered a new method of execution. It is neat, efficient and random. The public loves it, because it seems comparatively humane. It's called solitary confinement.

Though corrections officials in Maine have vigorously defended the state's policies as complying with “nationally accepted standards," the recent record of death in Maine's solitary cells suggest that's not a very high bar to cross.

In 1963, a man named Ernesto Miranda was arrested for kidnapping and raping a mildly retarded 18-year-old woman in Arizona. It was a case that might've been utterly forgotten, except for one thing. Miranda's conviction was eventually overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court, because Miranda had been denied the chance to avoid self-incrimination and access a lawyer.

Out of that case came what we know today as the Miranda Rights, which every suspect is read after they're arrested: “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney, etc.”

Pretty standard, right? So why are we seeing a sudden torrent of outrage in the case of Faisal Shahzad, a naturalized U.S. citizen who was read his rights after being arrested on suspicion of orchestrating last week's New York bomb attempt?

When Neil White was sentenced to 18 months for bank fraud at the Federal Medical Center in Carville, LA, he thought of it as a brief time out. “Daddy is going to camp,” he and his wife told their two children. When he emerged from this combination of prison and leprosarium (leper colony) on April 24, 1994, though, he was single and a broken camper, destined to depend on the very friends and family he had defrauded.

But he also emerged with a changed heart and a rebooted social conscience, as he describes in his recent book, In the Sanctuary of Outcasts. And yet inside prison, Neil’s greatest teacher held no Ph.D. in philosophy or criminal justice, nor was she a prison employee. She was a black, wheelchair-bound, legless leper named Ella Bounds.

Too often, corrections officials are overly concerned with policy and procedures. Even as they're surrounded by thousands of prisoners, they've lost the human touch. As any prisoner can attest, a prison's day-to-day life is one laborious, repetitive routine designed to maintain the status quo — one that's too often devoid of empathetic relationships. But sometimes an Ella Bounds — someone discarded by family and society — can touch the lives of other prisoners with incredible results.

My interest is always piqued when I hear of great success stories from evangelical ministries serving audiences that are literally captive.

That's what's happening right now in the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. Over at Solitary Watch, Jim Ridgeway writes a provocative piece chronicling this trend, which has been pushed by prison warden Burl Cain. While Cain's s program of Christian education has been widely lauded for its ability to reduce prison violence, Ridgeway thinks there may be another side to Angola's transformation. I'd tend to agree.

Between the glowing press reports on Cain's work, there are hints that gaining access to prison programming — education programs, for example — may be conditional on whether a prisoner is willing to embrace evangelical Christianity. The only college degree program at Angola, for example, is in Christian ministry (through New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary), and requires a statement of personal faith in Jesus Christ for admission.

Nevertheless, Christian media has been quick to promote Cain’s evangelistic passion as a new model for prison reform. Who could object to the fact that next week at Angola, the popular Bible club AWANA ("Bringing Jesus to Prison") is helping to host what may be the largest gathering of children and their incarcerated dads in U.S. history? (On May 1, some 1,000 children will be gathering at Angola for games, food, crafts and pony rides and a chance to hear their dads say, “I’m sorry/I love you.”)

In his book, Did I Ever Tell You How Lucky You Are?, Dr. Seuss tells the story of a Bee-Watcher whose job it was to watch the other worker bees. The assumption was that a watched bee will work harder — but since the worker bees didn't seem to work any harder despite their new supervision, it was decided to employ a Bee Watcher-Watcher to make certain that the original Bee Watcher was doing his job. Time and bureaucracy lumbered on, leading to a whole line of Bee Watcher-Watchers. All of which boosted the employment rolls and assured that nothing would ever be done to upset the status quo.

That story should sound pretty familiar to legislators in Maine. After all, they're the ones that have introduced LD1611, a bill to limit the prolonged isolation of prisoners with diagnosed mental illness. But what started out as a promising measure quickly disintegrated into something that would simply ask the Maine Department of Corrections to study the problem — with the much more limited goal of defining how prison officials can maintain security without harming prisoners' mental health.

As a former legislator, I am sensitive to the pressures that legislative committee members are under to appeal to all sides of an issue. But when it comes to handling prisoners' mental health, we need lawmakers who don't simply lock prisoners away in solitary confinement for years or choose to dump them summarily in the streets once their sentence is through. Trying to distract from these issues — as some committee members did, saying how prison reform advocates were insulting staff who "put their lives on the line every day" — isn't helpful.

Meanwhile, LD1611 is just the latest layer in a chain of initiatives launched by Maine's Board of Corrections and other councils and committees — all of which have become so enmeshed in the Department of Corrections that you literally cannot find your way to the rest room without an escort. The Bee Watchers and the Bee Watcher-Watchers are now happily watching each other in mutual collaboration. And still, nothing's getting done on the real issue of solitary confinement — or other likewise pressing issues in Maine's prisons.

In my home state of Maine, one common way to defend the dismal treatment of prisoners is to say, “Our prisons are nothing like other prisons in the United States.” In other words, they're not nearly as bad as others out there.

Yet in response to a recent article I wrote about secrecy and homicide in Maine's prisons, I received an email from Mwalimu Johnson, an alumnus of what is considered to be the bloodiest prison in America: Louisiana State Prison at Angola. “I could not help thinking of some of my personal experiences during my periods of incarceration,” he said in response to my writing — especially his time at Angola.

Could it be possible that there is a common culture shared by prisoners in Maine, the state with the nation's lowest incarceration rate, and those in the state with the highest? I wanted to meet Johnson to learn what I as a white, privileged Yankee — even one who previously worked as a prison chaplain — could possibly know about conditions at dreaded Angola, one of the last refuges for Jim Crow. Jim Crow laws, you will recall, legitimized racism in the South. Officials at every level — church and state — believed that blacks were intellectually and culturally inferior to whites. Today, out of Angola’s 5,500 prisoners (95% of whom are lifers), fully 80% of them are still black, "employed" as farm workers and picking cotton at pennies an hour.

Yet it isn’t the cotton picking or even the disproportionate number of blacks in Louisiana's prisons that rests at the root of the prison culture it shares with Maine.