It was irritating listening to Maine public radio's coverage of today's hearing (Jan 29, 08) held by the Maine Legislature's Criminal Justice and Public Safety Committee on LD 2029, a bill authorizing the state taking over Maine's county jails and adding them to the state corrections system. Commissioner Martine Magnusson, here flanked by two county officials , was there. MTC simply didn't trouble to show up.
Nor even bother grab some audio of the testimony from the Committee's live web stream. Instead Maine Things Considered coverage (click on their 01/28/08 Monday progam) featured generalizations and a few phone bites from Dept of Corrections' associate commissioner for PR flackery Denise Lord, and other officialdom, who offered up blandly self congratulatory statements about the process of the proposal, not so much its implications for Maine society.
MTC missed an impressive hearing, and instead imbibed some tepid spin. Has MPBN cut down the number of MTC reporters/producers, or were too many other great things afoot? Let's hope the latter.
Happily while Maine Things Considered's microphones were nowhere in evidence, and WCSH intermittent, three print journalists knelt along one end of the long narrow room, their hands racing across notepads almost in unison, taking it down. Tomorrow's papers will show the result.
WCSH's Don Carrigan and camera guy popped in and out, capturing but a few of the official speakers before heading off to other legislative committee rooms. Maybe he took some shots from the doorway later on...?
The tiny committee room was filled with well-pressed suits and uniforms; a mingling of state and county correctional and law enforcers, none of whom testified on the bill LD 2029.
Neatly holstered tasers, the new electric whips, shone bright yellow here and there in the packed chamber. The atmosphere before and after the hearing was of well-disposed prosperous jailors and prison managers comparing pay packages. There had been some marathon sessions by statewide conference calls connecting all county and state correction officials, at which a major change (throwing more money to the counties) resulted in a shift by counties toward accepting the merger plan
That the commodity, sentenced Mainers in need of "beds", was a sure and constantly renewing resource, requiring long term financial planning and sophisticated inmate resource management, appeared a consensus of this assembly of the security officialdom of Maine, as well as the MM Association.
On the other hand a small number of reform-minded citizens came to the hearing; nearly all spoke precautionary words to the committee on such things as the potential for the merged system to break the vital connection between incarcerateds and their community and family that so demonstrably is needed to provide successful reentry thereto; gulagization: the possibility of the fused jails and state corrections facilities being used to punitively put 'troublemaker' jailees into 'internal exile' by sending them to facilities at distant ends of the state, or even, as the state already does with 'troublemaker' inmates under its supervision, to exile to distant states like Maryland.
In both cases and the risk of the proposed system causing the shunting of mentally ill jail inmates from around the state into a single designated mental ward jail, again far from home, from community support.
Important as the discussion was, apart from the print journalists (who all three likely had well-earned writer's cramps by the time the marathon hearing ended, Maine public radio media flubbed it. Here's a big D- for failing to properly cover the opening salvos of one of the contention over the most societally important bills of the Maine legislature this year. Don Carrigan & crew gets a C+; at least they got some stock footage. The print men and woman? Time will tell...
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