Maine’s overcrowded prisons are not just a problem for inmates. High cost to taxpayers, a lack of anti-recidivism programs and the stress placed on community systems is bringing the problem home to the rest of us.

Four mattresses rest against a wall of the Maine Correctional Center’s Multi-Purpose Unit, former office space permanently converted to cells.

Fifteen women are crammed around a lunch table. They are assuming four new cellmates are on their way, and speculate where the mattresses might go since the cells are full.

Jill Polley of Lewiston will be at the Windham facility until 2009, on a probation violation for an original drug charge. She, like all the women in the MPU, is waiting to get into the Women’s Center – another unit at the MCC – that was intended to handle all of Maine’s imprisoned women but now is too full to hold them.

There, they get psychological, educational and occupational programming. The idea is to help the women while they’re in, to be successful when they get out, so they don’t come back at a cost of $103 a day to Maine taxpayers – $35,000 a year.

Polley has four kids on the outside. She’s looking forward to a class on parenting while incarcerated.

Because of prison overcrowding, inmates like Polley are shut out of such programs, instead idling away months in the MPU.

Bitterness and frustration run rampant in Polley’s cell block and in many other units at the Maine Correctional Center – both male and female – because of the overcrowding. In the maximum security area, which is the first stop for inmates coming from the courts, cells designed for one hold two. In the minimum security area they house four men to a cell.

Of Maine’s two state prisons – the MCC in Windham for minimum- and medium-risk inmates, and the Maine State Prison in Warren for medium- and maximum-risk inmates – the bottleneck is at the MCC. Inmates there are backed up, waiting to be placed in housing for the duration of their sentences.

Once they are placed in one of the facilities, the problem is not quite as severe. But it still has strained resources and increased risk at both facilities.

In Windham, specialized sex offender and drug treatment programs for men can only hold half the population that need it. At Warren, there is one drug treatment counselor for more than 900 inmates, drastically underserving the population that needs it.

Overall, Maine’s prison population has increased 33 percent in the last 10 years – far exceeding predictions – rising to a record 2,155 inmates last month. To care for them, the state’s Corrections budget has doubled over that same time period, to $132 million in 2006, and now to $153 million in 2007, becoming the fourth-largest state department budget.

Given the state’s tight budget, officials say the top priorities are security and to provide the basic needs for the existing population. Programs aimed at reducing recidivism have to take a back seat, which, officials say, ultimately means more pressure on local police, courts and social service agencies when they have to deal with former inmates again.

Legislators and state officials plan to begin meeting this fall to find a long-term solution.

Reasons for overcrowding

Corrections officials give varying reasons for the overcrowding. From his perspective as Androscoggin County’s district attorney, Norm Croteau said a combination of two forces appear to be at work: More people are going to prison or those going to prison are being sentenced to longer stays.

In the last 10 years, both the number of arrests in Maine and the prison population have increased at different rates. From 1997 to 2006, the average number of inmates per day went from 1,509 to 2,007, an increase of 33 percent. The total number of arrests annually over that same period went from 42,469 to 49,654, an increase of 17 percent.

Denise Lord, associate commissioner of Corrections, said the arrest numbers and prison population numbers don’t go hand in hand. Arrest rates are indicators of instances of crime in the community, while prison population numbers represent policy response to crime, signifying a change in sentencing policies and practices.

The department doesn’t have any current statistics on whether courts are meting out longer sentences in Maine. The department is now actively compiling data to determine some of the forces behind the problem.

However, the Legislature has approved a number of laws in the last decade that establish minimum sentences for certain crimes, which officials believe has influenced the problem. In addition, at least one prison official believes that after the larger Warren prison opened, more longer sentences were issued and approved by judges that had the effect of sending inmates to Warren instead of crowded county jails.

As for more people going to prison in Maine, Croteau attributes part of that to better law enforcement.

“We’ve improved in society as time’s gone on so law enforcement is probably more efficient, probation is probably more efficient and people are being brought into court more often,” Croteau said.

That is particularly true for women. Between 1989 and 2006, arrest rates went up 85 percent for women, 7 percent for men. Officials have said that the increase for females has come from increased drug charges and traffic violations.

Sleeping on the floor

Two corrections officers were working in a tower overlooking a cell block at the MCC in Windham last month. The block is where prisoners first come in from the courts, and they are held at a maximum security level until they are classified otherwise, which sometimes can take months, said Jeff Merrill II, deputy superintendent in charge of security at the center.

This is where the worst overcrowding occurs. Each block was designed for 46 – however they have never held so few. Individual 66-square-foot cells within each block that were meant for one inmate have been doubled up, making room for 92.

Several months ago, before some inmates were boarded out to the county jails, there were an additional 35 inmates sleeping on the floor in the block’s common area.

“We tried putting a third guy in each cell, which doesn’t really work out,” said Merrill.

It jeopardized the safety of the block. Prisoners locked up in cells would shout out to those on the floor – most of them newly arrived and scared – and they weren’t able to tell who was threatening them.

“You can’t see the cells very well, if you have them all locked up,” said Corrections Officer Paul Cummings. “So when the prisoners yell, ‘We’re gonna get you, we’re gonna get you,” the prisoners on the floor don’t know who’s going to get them. That puts a lot of stress on the prisoners, Cummings said, which puts a lot of anxiety on the officers that have to work around them.

Some areas of the correctional center do have empty beds, such as in the minimum security unit, but they can’t be filled on a whim.

“When you get people in, it’s really luck of the draw. Are they going to be minimum or are they going to be medium?” Merrill said. “If they turn out medium, you can’t put them in minimum.”

Short- and long-term solutions

Lawmakers managed to put a bandage on the situation last spring by sending low-risk inmates to county jails at a cost of $85 a day. There’s a pre-release center for women opening in Bangor at the end of October and a proposal for a new prison in Washington County is being examined, but “building our way out of it isn’t working,” said Martin Magnusson, commissioner of Maine’s Department of Corrections.

Long-term answers will more likely develop once lawmakers this fall begin looking at the entire court and correctional systems for solutions.

Potential targets:

• Determine which services to offer inside prisons to help ensure people don’t come back. When such programs are successful, they save money in the long run.

• Identify potential changes in Maine’s sentencing procedures to use sentencing alternatives and community corrections more, particularly for non-violent offenders. These options cost much less, but there’s a stigma to get past.

“I think we rely on incarceration as our predominant form of punishment and we reinforce that as a society,” Lord said. “There has to be a consequence for criminal behavior and that consequence is translated into incarceration and longer periods of incarceration.”

In a related issue, Gov. John Baldacci has promised cost savings to the Corrections budget with a proposal for the state to take over the county jails.

County officials have frowned on the proposal, and the chairmen of the Legislature’s Criminal Justice and Public Safety Committee are hesitant to support it. “It doesn’t work for my community, it doesn’t work for any community in the state,” said Rep. Stan Gerzofsky, D-Brunswick, House chairman.

A tale of two women

The Women’s Center at the MCC has become a nationally renowned program. Two other programs there for men, a drug treatment program and sex offender program, are also promising, officials say.

When the Women’s Center opened in 2002, officials anticipated not having to fill its 78 beds for 10 years. They had 52 females at the time, today they have 130, according to the younger Merrill at the MCC.

He doesn’t want to crowd the Women’s Center too much, or else it will lose its impact.

“We didn’t want it to affect the whole women’s population the way it affected the women when they were in the MPU and really breaking down emotionally, and by the time they come here it’s like ‘Phew, OK, I’m through the hardest part,'” Merrill said.

Carella Brooks of Lewiston waited seven months to get into the center. Since then she’s been certified to do construction work, which will help her when she is released in 2009.

While the unit is secure, doors don’t lock at night, and a variety of programs help the women keep busy.

“It’s nice up here because it’s more relaxed, you have more freedom. You have windows you can actually open and close, which is a big plus,” Brooks said. “It gives women a chance to be more incorporated, to go back out into society.”

In contrast, in the MPU, the women bemoan the thought of getting another inmate, since they’re already stretched for space.

Back on that August day, four men hauled a bunk bed frame into the unit, their first of two trips. The frames get moved around the center regularly, Merrill said.

The women speculated the new inmates would be placed in a former conference room, slightly larger than a two-person cell.

“Four girls cannot fit in that room! Three can’t even fit,” one woman said.

The sunnier atmosphere in the women’s center shows in Brooks’ attitude.

“I try to make the best of it,” Brooks said. “You have to realize that you put yourself in here and you can’t blame anybody else for your mistakes. When you come here you have to learn to accept the consequences of your own actions. They don’t call us inmates or prisoners. We’re residents, we’re not treated like subhumans. We’re respected up here by staff as long as we treat them with respect.”