prison whistleblowers

Portrait of a Prison Whistleblower————and His Punishment

Guest Post by Lance Tapley

I often tell people—perhaps shocking some—that a prison inmate I know, Deane Brown, is one of the most moral individuals I’ve ever met. This despite the fact that he had gotten in deep trouble since early childhood because, he once told me, he felt no moral compunction about taking things from well-off people.

As a consequence of that lack of scruple, he is serving 59 years for masterminding a string of burglaries in Maine in the 1990s. It’s probably a life sentence.

Here’s a typical Deane Brown story: Seven years ago, when he was at the Maine State Prison, the lights went out in his “pod” because of an electrical malfunction. There were no emergency lights.

“It was pitch dark,” Haley Black told me. She was a new, 21-year-old guard and the only officer in the pod, which housed 64 men. “Especially for a female, all kinds of things could happen.”

She was startled to find Brown, a husky man, backing up to her. “‘I’ll protect you in case something happens,’” he told her.

When the lights came on, some chairs had been thrown around, but nothing had happened to her. Black, now a student at a community college, said of her protector: “He’s a sweet guy.”

Around the time of that incident was when I first heard of Brown. In the summer of 2005 I received an email that began: “I’m writing to ask you to take a hard look at the Maine State Prison’s treatment of inmates at its ‘Supermax’ facility in Warren, Maine.”

The email’s author, Ron Huber, a political activist who lives near the prison and who has a weekly call-in show on a tiny community radio station, described letters and phone calls from an inmate, Brown, who complained about the guards’ harshness, the unsanitary conditions, and the destructive solitary confinement of the wing of the prison—officially, the Special Management Unit—that he had been thrust into.

I had reported on Maine government for many years, but I knew nothing about the supermax. For that matter, like most reporters, I knew nothing about prisons.

After several requests and an appeal to the governor’s office, I finally got to see Brown that fall. Although we were separated by thick Plexiglas in a “non-contact” cubicle, he was in handcuffs and leg irons. Then in his early 40s with long, dark hair and a wispy beard, he proved to be highly intelligent and articulate.

He had been held in the unit for months, he said, because guards had discovered small tools in his cell that they claimed could be used in an escape attempt. Brown said he used them to fix inmates’ radios.

“It’s supposed to be an administrative program for correcting behavior,” he said of the supermax. Instead, “It’s creating animals.”

For more than four years, Maine prisoner Deane Brown has faced isolation and exile for his role as a prison journalist and whistleblower. Brown was serving a lengthy sentence for burglary and robbery in the lockdown unit of Maine State Prison when he began filing reports, by letter, which were aired on WRFR community radio in 2005. The following year he began broadcasting himself, by telephone, in a series of weekly reports on WRFR called “Live from the Hole.” Brown also supplied material to journalist Lance Tapley for his stories in the Portland Phoenix on abuses in the supermax unit.

In late 2006, after receiving letters from the warden warning him to cease “disclosing confidential information through the media,” Brown was suddenly transferred from Maine State Prison to a series of maximum security prisons in Maryland. As Tapley reported at the time, the Maine corrections commissioner called Brown “a very serious threat to the facility,” despite his lack of any violent offenses inside prison.

Now Brown has been moved once again, to a particularly brutal solitary confinement unit in New Jersey, according to a new report by Tapley:

Deane Brown, a Maine inmate shipped out of state because of his criticism of the Maine State Prison, is now being held in New Jersey in “one of the most repressive” prison units in the country, often reserved for “political” or activist prisoners like black radicals, says Bonnie Kerness of the American Friends Service Committee’s national Prison Watch. Inmates are not put there because of what they’ve done but because of who they are, she says, adding that the unit specializes in psychological “no-touch torture” techniques such as sleep deprivation, noise, and unsanitary conditions.

In Brown’s case, toilet water sometimes floods his solitary-confinement cell floor, and he has sores on his feet from his severe diabetes. Day and night he hears a mentally ill prisoner in the next cell banging on his metal door. Two inmates in his unit have recently set themselves on fire. His cell is cold, and he’s allowed only a thin cotton blanket and no pillow.

This picture is put together from reports from Brown’s friend, Beth Berry, of Rockland, who has received phone calls from him, and Jean Ross, a pro-bono attorney who recently visited him at the New Jersey State Prison in Trenton, where he’s in the harsh Management Control Unit.

Maine authorities transferred Brown to Maryland in 2006 after he blew the whistle to the Phoenix on inmate abuse at the state prison’s “supermax” isolation facility. In October Maine prison guards took him from Maryland to New Jersey. In a recent phone call, Brown, 47, told Berry that he had lost 40 pounds since then.

He told Ross he was feeling desperate because the prison wasn’t responding to his medical needs and was violating its rules for the placement of inmates in maximum security. She is relaying his concerns to prison officials.

Sentenced in Maine to 59 years for burglary and robbery, Brown also told Ross he believes he was put in the unit because Maine’s Department of Corrections told its New Jersey counterpart that he’s an escape risk due to his locksmith abilities. He has never tried to escape from prison, he says, or been violent.