Comment by arbuge
3 years ago
>> the success of the Maine model of corrections should highlight the absolutely embarrassing lack of opportunities in the rest of the system
Very well said. And I am glad we have a model now, if one was ever needed. I hope other prison systems take note.
As someone actively working in this space, I can tell you they are. Maine is following the so-called Scandinavian Model. It essentially comes down to giving incarcerated people a chance to practice normal daily activities and social interactions. The facilities feel more like highly secure dorms than jails. The way a head of a different DoC said still sticks with me:
We send people away for years, tell them exactly what to do every day and they get to make exacrly one choice every day: do you obey or not? That's the only choice you get to make. Then, after 3, 5, 10 years, we send them out into society and tell them, "Make better choices." But we haven't prepared them for that at all. We have given them almost no chances to make decisions and learn how to make good ones. We just tell them the decision to make and they do it. There's no space for practicing good decisions in traditional prison settings.
Multiple other states are pointing to Maine as proof that the Scandinavian model can work in the US and are incorporating their learnings into their plans and trainings.
We send people away for years, tell them exactly what to do every day and they get to make exacrly one choice every day: do you obey or not? That's the only choice you get to make. Then, after 3, 5, 10 years, we send them out into society and tell them, "Make better choices." But we haven't prepared them for that at all. We have given them almost no chances to make decisions and learn how to make good ones. We just tell them the decision to make and they do it. There's no space for practicing good decisions in traditional prison settings.
This really puts things in perspective. Thank you for sharing!
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None of the places I was housed at had any opportunities, really.
One place had computers to learn typing. You weren't allowed computer books in that facility in case you used them to figure out how to hack out of the jail. So, bless the elderly nuns, they smuggled in "C# in a Weekend" for me, with the CD-ROM, so I could teach programming classes when the guards weren't paying attention.
Seems like a good idea, but from the article it sounds like a lot of the difference between Maine and his earlier prisons was the culture that existed amongst the prisoners themselves. Obviously prison officials can try to influence this (indeed, it sounds like the authors transfer to Maine was an attempt to do that), but it seems like the kind of thing that's hard to do with just, like, correspondence college degree programs and the like.