Click on headline for complete article in the Portland Phoenix. The photo on the website is five years old, Deane well before held in solitary in Maine state prison Warren. He now has neatly trimmed short hair and neartly trimmed beard.
Prison ‘troublemaker’ confronts racism, medical abuse
Vacillating between grit and despair — between aggressive lawsuits and suicide attempts — Deane Brown, the prisoner who in 2005 blew the whistle on the torture of mentally ill inmates at the Maine State Prison’s solitary-confinement “Supermax” unit, is struggling against prison conditions in Maryland, where he was exiled by the Baldacci administration. (See “Baldacci’s ‘Political Prisoner,’” by Lance Tapley, November 21, 2006.)
In August, Brown was transferred from Western Correctional Institution in Cumberland to North Branch Correctional Institution, also in Cumberland, which houses many of Maryland’s most serious offenders. When sent to Maryland in 2006 he first had been put in the state’s Supermax, in Baltimore.
Brown was given no reason for the recent move, but his Maryland inmate-legal-aid lawyer, Joseph Tetrault, says prison authorities view him as a troublemaker. According to his Rockland friend Beth Berry, who has talked with him on the phone, in North Branch he has already been “jumped and assaulted by three men in the shower.”
An intelligent and tolerant man, well liked in Maine by both inmates and guards, Brown, 45, has resisted what he calls “rampant” racism in Maryland’s prisons and has refused to join gangs. At Western, he tried to take a law correspondence course paid for by a Maine supporter, but had to abandon it. In a letter to a school official, he explained: “I have tried to move out of a cell I share with a racist. He seems to think he can convince me to believe, as he does, that being white makes me more human than those who are not. We constantly argue and sometimes fight. I cannot study or even sleep regularly.”
He has also complained about the Maryland system’s treatment of his diabetes, at one point obtaining a court order requiring the prison to ensure he is given food soon after an insulin injection. He also received $2500 in damages because of the prison system’s neglect. But Brown reports the judge’s order has been ignored and he is still at risk of going into diabetic shock from low blood sugar if he isn’t given food in a timely manner. As he testified in one court proceeding:
“When I’m laying on the floor, sweating profusely, urinating all over myself, vomiting, the nurse finally comes in. . . . She’s screaming give him something to eat, now, and I’ve been screaming for three hours to get something to eat. That’s an imminent fear of death right there for me.”
He has at times refused to accept the insulin if he isn’t given food properly, but the judge also has ruled injections can be forced on him. Tetrault has appealed this ruling to a higher state court, with a December hearing expected.
Brown struggles with despair over both his personal condition and conditions he witnesses. “People get Maced and beaten regularly over here, for little or no reason,” he wrote in a letter to Tetrault, about the Western prison. By his own reports he has tried to kill himself twice.
“Maine threw him to the wolves,” Berry says.
She is one of a small group of supporters who have tried to keep up his courage. Ron Huber, 53, host of a Rockland radio show to which Brown placed on-air telephone calls about inmate treatment when he was at the prison in Warren, has been demanding that Governor John Baldacci bring him back to Maine. Earlier this summer in Augusta Huber had a confrontation on the issue with an angry David Farmer, Baldacci’s chief press aide, who told him the governor backs up the Corrections department’s decisions.
Afterwards, a solitary Huber — he has a mild, bespectacled, professorial air — knelt in the State House’s Rotunda before a glass case containing the red, white, blue, and gold 1862 First Maine Heavy Artillery battle flag. He ceremonially pronounced aloud the names of the 20-plus Maine prisoners now in out-of-state prisons, thumping on a drum after each name.
Maine prison officials said they sent Brown to Maryland because he was a “threat to the facility,” though he has no history of violence. He is serving a 59-year sentence for a string of burglaries. Last year he lost a federal civil-rights lawsuit asking that he be returned to Maine.
Brown’s experience in Maryland, Huber says, shows “what a powerful tool it is to exile people. It’s a lot easier for people to break down when they’re far from their social matrix.”
Brown’s experience also shows “the frightening ability of prison officials to bury an inmate who has the courage to speak out against injustice,” says David Bidler of the Maine Prisoner Advocacy Coalition. He suggested supporters write to Deane Brown at #339-621, North Branch Correctional Institution, 14100 McMullen Highway S.W., Cumberland, MD 21502.
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