On a stretch of Route 1, I stopped at a vast, flat field no different from any other I had passed along the way. The grass was sparse and there were no trees to obscure the view. An occasional scrap of debris blew across the land and disappeared. Just another field along Route 1. And yet oddly compelling to stare at while traffic buzzed by.
I was looking at 15.6 acres with train tracks beyond it and a river snaking away in another direction. Unremarkable. Had I never been there before, I wouldn’t have guessed a horrible house of brick once sat on the spot, home to thousands of prisoners over the past 180 years.

The state prison at Thomaston is long gone. You can stand right in the middle of that field and hear birds chirp. There are no clanging bars or screaming inmates to be heard. If there are any ghosts cavorting at the site of the old prison, they have no dark places in which to hide.

A short drive away in Warren sprawls the new state prison. It looks nothing like old Tommy Town. It’s a maze of stark, white buildings surrounded by fences and barbed wire. Remove the wire and you might be looking at an office building built by lunatics. Not a Hollywood prison at all.

In the winter of 2002, the last of the inmates were shipped out of Thomaston. They were taken down the road a sneeze to the new prison. Some were driven farther away to the prison in Windham. Meanwhile, men and machines took apart the looming, exotic prison at Thomaston.

I don’t know if there’s a correlation, but I’ve been getting a whack of mail from prisoners since the move. Some are doing their time in Warren. They complain that some of the most vicious, unstable prisoners were moved along to Windham – to a prison regarded as less hostile and severe than the state pen in Warren.

It gets confusing. Prisoners in Warren seem bitter that murderers, rapists and child molesters got a free ride to Windham. A few inmates in Windham complain that some of those rapists and child molesters are now getting preferential treatment there.

On the outside, where you come and go freely, it’s easy to think that a prison is a prison. Cells, doors that clank and guards who snarl. Horrid food, shakedowns and makeshift weapons fashioned out of nothing.

But back in the day, Thomaston was always regarded as the big league. If you committed a vile crime that warranted a long stretch, that’s where you ended up. And good riddance to you. The gavel came down, the bus rolled away and the big steel doors facing Route 1 slammed closed.

Now it’s hard to figure out who goes where. Sex offenders, the most reviled of the prison population, seem to be scattered everywhere. Inmates in both prisons complain wildly about them.

The people in Windham write about corrupt corrections officers and unhealthy living conditions. The people in Warren write about friends committing suicide in their cells.

There are other prisons here and there around the state. But the convicts I hear from are almost exclusively from Warren or Windham. The letter-writers seem to be in competition over which prison will produce the most horrid story. It’s a close call so far. People with hepatitis serving food here, abusive guards there. A hanging in this joint, a gang assault in that one.

At the state prison in Warren, each cell has a window. Each pod has a day room where the prisoners can watch some tube or play cards. The population is more than 1,000 inmates. The Maine Correctional Center in Windham is a minimum to medium security prison with roughly 550 men and 110 women serving time.

I doubt anyone really misses the dungeon-like prison at Thomaston. By all accounts, it was a hellish place. But for those on the outside, it stood tall as a representative of the end of the line, a place where those deemed truly wicked were sent.

Mark LaFlamme is the Sun Journal crime reporter.