Hoping to Avoid the Bloody Days of Old
Fifteen of my 17 years of incarceration have been spent here in Maine State Prison (MSP). I’ve experienced the leadership of six wardens, at least four Department of Corrections commissioners, and more deputy wardens than I can keep track of. I’ve seen this prison progress from repressive to responsive leadership. Now, under Warden Nathan Thayer, the pendulum is swinging back toward repression and there is no independent oversight or mechanism to stop it. For MSP to avoid a resurgence of its bloody days of old, this needs to change.
I and others on both sides of the walls have reached out with pleas for decency and care to be shown. In the absence of any response, I offered a soft word of concern last December [“Concern and Hope at Maine State Prison”] and things have only gotten worse. Now, I state my fear and concern explicitly, paired with a call for public action.
Repressive leadership generates the same tension and violence it claims to prevent. I arrived at MSP at the tail end of “The Bloody Mile” era. Then 18 years old, I kept hearing about the violence I should plan to experience upon my arrival at the prison. I had a target on my back, and the walkway connecting housing units to chow halls, the visitation room and the medical department — The Bloody Mile — was waiting for my blood to be spilled.
The reality was not as dire, but still bad. I had a full three weeks outside of segregation before I was set up to fight a former Golden Gloves boxer. He gave me the scar on my nose, but that was a one-on-one fight. The only time I’ve been jumped by multiple people is when six staff members maced and extracted me from my cell the following year. I’d been fighting, metaphorically, for a small increase in quality of life for people serving more than a year straight in segregation.
I’d lost the fist fight, but winning the fight for others in seg was an early step in gaining respect as a “solid” prisoner. It helped me avoid the social pressure to participate in “Spring Cleaning.”
Every year, after a long Maine winter, it was the duty of young aspiring convicts to target and beat up “undesirables”: people with sexual offenses on their record or who’d snitched on someone, owed too much debt, or stole from other incarcerated people. There’d be a couple weeks of peace when it first started getting warm — even the sporadic self-harm would cease. Then Spring Cleaning would begin and not a day would pass without somebody being assaulted. This would continue for a couple weeks or so, followed by a brief pause for people to catch their breath. Then the daily violence resumed.
I carry in my mind at least one image of violence that happened in almost every area of this prison. Last week I witnessed a man stomping on another’s head in rage. It pulled me back to 2011, when less than six feet in front of me, a quiet man with tattoos pulled out a razor blade and slashed open a younger man’s face from left ear to nose. His cheek wide open, the bleeding man chased his assailant across the width of the gym to a bathroom, where the other was trying to flush his weapon down the toilet. After feeding his attacker fists, the bleeding man also stomping down on his skull.
Under the leadership of Warden Matt Magnusson, and Randy Liberty before him, I could see their decency, humanity, and care for both residents and staff. I can see none of that now. More than a year into the current leadership, I have seen a steady reversion to repressive tactics, targeting of individual residents and staff, mass lockdowns and shakedowns, arbitrary punishments, and a gross level of inconsistency in the day-to-day running of this prison. Warden Thayer’s callous leadership is increasing tensions to the point that disorder is becoming an inevitability.
Prison is a system of power and control that operates with little-to-no meaningful oversight or accountability. It operates in darkness and filters information by instilling fear of reprisal in the chosen few residents allowed to speak. In the absence of humane or reasonable leadership, my silence would be complicity in any further harms caused.
A bill expected to be introduced in next year’s short session of the Maine Legislature, titled, An Act to Establish the Corrections Ombudsman (LD 1962), may finally provide a check on the near absolute power wielded by Maine wardens. Please reach out to your state representative and senator and let them know LD 1962 needs their vote, because our state’s largest prison needs reform.
Leo Hylton is a PhD student at George Mason University’s Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution, currently incarcerated at Maine State Prison. His education and work are focused on Social Justice Advocacy and Activism, with a vision toward an abolitionist future. You can reach him at: Leo Hylton #70199, 807 Cushing Rd., Warren, ME 04864, or leoshininglightonhumanity@gmail.com.
