St. Petersburg Times
"Go to Jail, Get to Vote - in Maine or Vermont"
August 6, 2004
By Vanessa Gezari
WINDSOR, Vt. - Liz Baker is a registered Republican who's concerned about
education, health care and the preservation of Social Security.
A mother of three and former Girl Scout leader, she'll read the newspaper
every day between now and November. She'll question the elected officials she
meets, and she'll try to convince others in her community to register,
explaining that every voice makes a difference.
This fall, Baker, 38, will mail her absentee ballot from the Southeast State
Correctional Facility, a minimum security women's prison in southern Vermont's
rolling farm country. She is serving four years for killing a man while driving
drunk one summer morning two years ago.
"Being incarcerated is the most powerless feeling you could ever
imagine, and seizing this one power, this one way of mattering, is huge,"
she says. "You have to grab on to it."
The man Baker killed was Bill MacLeay, 54, a history teacher and father of
two who worked 17 years in local government and was running for the state
Legislature when he died. His widow, Maggie MacLeay, doesn't think Baker should
be allowed to vote while she's in prison. But once she has served her time,
MacLeay believes her rights should be restored.
"If you truly believe that the reason we have a prison system is that we
want to rehabilitate people, then if they can be released and live normal lives,
why wouldn't you want that?" asks MacLeay, a 55-year-old nurse.
Maine and Vermont are the only states in the country that allow prisoners to
vote. In Florida, felons are permanently disenfranchised unless they obtain
clemency. Most states fall somewhere in between, restoring voting rights after
inmates complete their sentences.
The question of whether ex-convicts should be free to shape society through
the ballot box is at issue across the country. Since 1996, 11 states have
changed their laws, eight of them making it easier for felons to vote after
serving time.
Interviews with a half dozen inmates who plan to vote in Maine and Vermont
suggest that prisoners' political concerns mirror those of other Americans. They
include the war in Iraq, unemployment and the environment, along with criminal
sentencing and corrections policy.
Rob Porter, 39 and serving 121/2 years for burglary at Maine State Prison in
Warren, votes regularly and plans to do so this fall. He's against gay marriage
and abortion, and says he looks for candidates who will help people in need.
On the outside he was an electrician, a trade he learned during an earlier
prison stint. He would like to see more job training programs because, he says
half-jokingly, "not everyone can go to prison to learn a trade like I
did."
Drugs and crime have marred Porter's life, but he also has seen bright
periods. In the small society of the prison, he is a mechanic who takes college
classes, reads USA Today and Prison Legal News and belongs to the Long Timers
Group, a nonprofit that donates to charities and tries to educate prisoners
about the workings of the corrections system.
To deprive him of voting rights, he says, would take away his only means of
public expression in a system that forces conformity. He understands that he did
something wrong, but when he leaves prison, he wants a shot at respectability.
"If they take that away, I just feel they're putting out the fire,"
he says. "Even though the fire might be a good fire, they're still putting
it out."
Another prisoner, 39-year-old Michael Lamore, said he'll vote to re-elect
George W. Bush this year, though he disagrees with the president's economic
policy and opposes the war in Iraq. Lamore, serving time for insurance and bank
fraud at Northern State Correctional Facility in Newport, Vt., said he supports
Bush's approach to the war on terror, including the creation of the Department
of Homeland Security and the war in Afghanistan.
Across the blue-carpeted visiting room, 60-year-old Thomas Karov, doing 20 to
30 years for domestic assault and kidnapping, said he's not thrilled with John
Kerry, but he won't vote for Bush.
"I don't think we should have our kids dying in Iraq," he says.
"Who appointed us the moral guardians of the world? I don't get it."
In Maine, victims' advocates and Rep. Mary Black Andrews have challenged the
state law. Andrews, whose state trooper husband was murdered in the line of duty
40 years ago, says there is strong support for stripping inmates' voting rights.
Among the advocates is Debbie O'Brien, a member of Parents of Murdered Children
whose 20-year-old son Devin was shot in the back of the head eight years ago by
a man who offered him a ride home.
"It's frustrating to think that the killer of my son, who has probably
another 17 years to go in prison, if he chooses to vote, has that right,"
O'Brien says. "That does not seem just or fair. I think when you commit
murder you give up the right that any living person on this earth has."
Nevertheless, even Maine's official victim's advocate is against
disenfranchisement, arguing that most prisoners eventually return to the
community and shouldn't lose all their rights.
Jeffrey D. Merrill, the warden at Maine State, occasionally gets calls from
people who don't want inmates to vote. He tells them that very few prisoners
actually take advantage of the right. Of the 900 inmates at his prison, the
largest and only maximum security facility in the state, Merrill and other
officials estimate that between five and 60 will vote.
* * *
At Southeast State in Vermont, Assistant Superintendent Fran Drake plans to
plaster the walls with posters about voting and work with the prison teacher and
the Windsor town clerk to register inmates.
"It's part of our civics course down in the (prison) high school and
it's just part of the curriculum that we educate people to vote and have a
voice," Drake says.
Like other supporters of inmate voting rights, Drake believes the franchise
is a step on the path to rehabilitation. About 100 women live at the prison, a
former dairy farm with weathered barns and silos ringed by glittering razor
wire. Their crimes range from writing bad checks to murder. They punch license
plates and build furniture, grow organic vegetables in a sprawling hillside
garden and care for a half dozen stray cats.
Halfway through her four-year sentence for killing Bill MacLeay while driving
drunk, Liz Baker lives in Echo unit, a wood cabin set on a hillside above the
rest of the prison. On her bedroom walls hang photos of her 5-year-old son
celebrating his birthday at Ben and Jerry's, her 8-year-old daughter's first
communion and her 10-year-old daughter jumping on a big bay horse. There's even
a picture of the family's golden retriever, Twist.
She paid another inmate five packs of cigarettes to crochet a brightly
colored blanket for the bed so she can tell her kids something nice about the
place she now calls home.
Baker is a petite, neatly dressed woman with a firm handshake and a fleeting
smile. Two years ago, she volunteered at her kids' schools and shuttled them to
riding lessons and after school practice in a minivan. She and her husband, a
wholesale beer and wine distributor, lived outside Burlington, a brisk college
town on the banks of Lake Champlain.
The night before she killed MacLeay, Baker told a friend she had everything -
she and her husband were getting along, the kids were happy, they had enough
money. But since her son's birth, Baker had suffered from depression. Her doctor
prescribed Paxil and Prozac, but in the hollows the medicine didn't reach, she
started to drink.
It began with a bottle of red wine late in the afternoon, while she was
making dinner for the kids or doing laundry. When there was no wine, she'd drive
to the liquor store and buy 1-ounce bottles of Absolut vodka, small enough to
hide in her pocket. At least once when she had been drinking, she drove to buy
more liquor with her kids in the car.
In July 2002, Baker and her husband threw a party at her mother-in-law's
cottage in nearby Colchester. The nanny took the kids and Baker got drunk.
The next morning, she treated her headache with two large screwdrivers and
cleaned the house. She had to pick up the kids, so she took the nanny's car, a
stick shift. She was used to an automatic.
She drove into town, past the street where Bill MacLeay lived, past the shop
selling Vermont maple syrup and the Congregational church, past a stand of
lupines and a stretch of woods. Coming down a hill, she realized she was going
too fast. She headed for an open patch of grass on the other side of the road,
crossing the center line and the opposite lane. She says she never saw Bill
MacLeay, who was cycling downhill toward her.
MacLeay, a genial man with ruddy cheeks and a dry sense of humor, taught at a
community college and worked on the Colchester planning commission and the town
select board. For several years, he was chairman of the board, the equivalent of
mayor.
He taught alternative students - farmers, loggers and housewives from
Vermont's Northeast Kingdom. Maggie MacLeay likes to say the real Vermont is in
those hills, in the cold, open fields and rural reaches of the northern country,
where people drink their way through long winters and farmers will sell their
souls to send their kids to school.
MacLeay had a gift for remembering names that helped him in politics. He
hated campaigning, but he loved the tough work of government and could give a
speech off the cuff. He got land turned over for public parks. He saved an old
church and built a new town hall.
When he died, Mrs. MacLeay, a motherly woman with ginger hair and wire-rimmed
glasses, went back to nursing cancer patients.
Mrs. MacLeay is glad Liz Baker is in prison. She says it wouldn't have been
any different if someone had come into the house and stabbed her husband while
he slept.
"Do I hate her with every fiber of my being? No. She did something bad.
She's going to have to live with what she did every day, and I'm going to have
to live with it. Neither one of us are winners. Both of us lost."
The real question, she says, is "How do you go on? How do you do
something with your life from this?"
Liz Baker asks herself the same question.
When she learned MacLeay had died, she wanted to die too. But after speaking
with a prison therapist, she decided that wasn't the answer.
MacLeay "was a really good guy and really involved, he really
lived," she says. "I want to do as much as I can in the community to
make up for it, so people won't suffer his loss so much."
Baker has become an activist in prison, though she never was before. She
serves on committees. She writes to legislators. She always voted, but this year
it's more important and more personal, partly because she is inspired by
MacLeay's life and wants to carry on his work. She acknowledges that before,
politics was a matter of distant budgets and choices that didn't seem to affect
her much. Now, the state controls every aspect of her life. She's not sure whom
she'll choose for president, but she's leaning toward Bush.
She says the past two years have made her a richer person, but that doesn't
stop her from wishing they hadn't happened. Her kids visit twice a month, and
the pain of seeing them takes her breath away. When they leave, she goes to her
room and crawls into bed. She wants them to stop growing.
Part of her agrees with people who say criminals shouldn't be allowed to
vote. But she thinks that people who can't change don't want to vote anyway, and
wouldn't care if the right were taken away. In her case, she says, it's
different. She believes she has something to contribute.
"I owe a great debt to society," she says. "and I've always
paid my debts."
She often wonders what would have happened if MacLeay hadn't died. Would she
have changed so radically?
Liz Baker doesn't know. All she knows is that now she has nothing to lose.
|