SUCCESSES & STALEMATES! In 2011,the Maine Legislature's Committee on Criminal Justice and Public Safety considered LD 690. An Act To Amend the Laws Governing the Transfer of Prisoners to Other States. The bill would have assisted Mainer inmates transferred under the Interstate Corrections Compact to return to Maine to serve out their sentences. HOWEVERAfter the Department of Corrections worked out a compromise with prison reformers - radically modifying the department's policies on sending prisoners out of Maine and then returning them - the bill's proponents dropped the bill, letting it receive an Ought Not To Pass. NOW and focusing on working with the Department on implementing the new policy Listen to hearings and worksessions on LD 690 and other prison reform bills Click Here

Last year, 2009-2010 session, Maine's legislature declined to reform state's Solitary Confinement Policies, passing instead Resolve 213. directing the Department of Corrections to investigate itself.

EXILED INMATE-REPORTER STILL ADRIFT IN 2011. WRFR Community Radio Prison News reporter-inmate Deane Rowland Brown was exiled from the state of Maine in 2006 by now-disgraced former Maine State Prison Warden Jeffrey Merrill, after Brown, exposed corruption and mismanagement at the prison to investigative journalists, forcing the prison to reform its prisoner punishment policies. (Scroll down this page for links to brown's activities as inmate correspondent.)

Brown, serving a lengthy burglary sentence for crimes committed in his native Maine, has no history of violence before or after incarceration. He was nonetheless exiled by now-ousted Warden Jeffrey Merrill, who declared him the "most dangerous man in Maine state prison".

Abruptly shipped from there to the Maryland Correctional Adjustment Center in Baltimore, he languished in solitary confinement for a year before being transferred, then with little warning, to the Western Correctional Institute in Cumberland, Maryland in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. A year later, off to the "UltraMax" Northbranch Correctional Institute , part of the same prison complex . Northbranch however, is an Ultra Max facility, ostensibly there to isolate gang leaders and those who assault guards / other inmates. (Since being moved there, Brown has already been assaulted).

In late 2010, Brown was moved again, to the Garden State's notorious New Jersey State Prison in Trenton, NJ.

As of February 2, 2011, he remains there. How a non violent inmate from Maine has come to be dumped into a succession of "worst of the worst" hellholes defies understanding.

Write him:

Deane R. Brown
SBI# OS01621749
Inmate# 666655
New Jersey State Prison
PO Box 861
Trenton NJ 08625

Maine State Prison investigated by OPEGA - Read June 2009 report here (6 pg pdf) . Listen to a story about the OPEGA report on Maine Public Radio News

Tapley on Mass Torture in America (including Maine)

September 2007 Update 9/26/07: Writer Lance Tapley excoriates Baldacci Administration for willfully ducking responsibility for human rights violations in Brown's Maryland prison cell.
9/12/07. Prison Rewards exiled hero-inmate with a stab in the back!

LETTERS
To and from WRFR Community radio and Maine Prison officials.

From Exiled Deane R. Brown
August 14, 2007. "This place has reclassified me from medium custody to maximum, meaning that I belong and must be kept with the absolute worst of the worst. But why? To shut me up and to punish me,that's why. "

June 17, 2007 "There are so many people supporting me to win this battle --so many who will see a better day if I win..."