Transcription of Mark Dion for the show Freedom, #65
Dr. Lisa: In the studio with us today, we have former Sheriff Mark Dion, who is all the current State Representative from District 113 here in Maine and a friend of mine from I think maybe about a decade back, when I was working at the Cumberland County Jail and you were the sheriff for Cumberland County. You’ve had so many different lives, before that point and since that point. I’m really glad that you’re here today to share some of those experiences.
Mark Dion: Thanks for inviting me. I hope our conversation is helpful.
Dr. Lisa: I can’t imagine it wouldn’t be. Even when I met you … I was the medical director for the Cumberland County Jail and think that anybody who has never been inside a jail setting, there’s just no way to completely describe it, but it’s like its own little society, its own little universe with its own little set of rules. Even from a medical standpoint, its own …
Mark Dion: It’s a village behind a fence. I think a lot of the general community would like to hope they don’t need to know about it, but it exists and it has consequences for the broader community, in terms of how people leave that village, what state they’re in and moreover why we send people to live in that village for pre-determined sets of time. I always thought I was the mayor of a unique community.
Dr. Lisa: You’ve had a chance to be a member of many different unique communities. You grew up in Lewiston, and you were just saying, before we got on the air, you grew up the same time as Governor LePage in Lewiston, and Lewiston is its own little unique community. What are some of the things you learned about growing up in Lewiston?
Mark Dion: Growing up in Lewiston, family was central. This idea of a bilingual community was core to who we were. I grew up in a Franco-American household and English was seen as a secondary language. French was what we spoke at home. There was this idea there was us and the Americans. It was an idea of my parents and their generation, especially their parents that whatever was going on in Lewiston was temporary, that eventually we would return to Canada. We sent resources to Canada. We had to make our annual pilgrimage there to be reminded that that was home and Maine was temporary. Then by the time my generation grew up, we saw ourselves as the true American generation.
I see that same parallel occurring now in other communities, whether it’s families from North Africa or South East Asia who have come into Maine. There’s a transition. It will take 3 generations. You have Cambodians in America, then you’ll have Afghan-Americans, then eventually you’ll have Americans who say they’re of Somali descent. There’s a journey there and it comes with blessing and frustration because the broader community expects that transition to be sometimes more quickly achieved than what’s possible.
Dr. Lisa: Tell me about some of the friction that can take place when you’re undergoing this journey, whether you’re an individual or a community.
Mark Dion: I think it surfaced in recent comments by the major in Lewiston, which is this idea of when do you adopt one culture and abandon another one. I think if you were asked from my opinion, I would gently suggest to him that it’s a melding. It’s a transformation. His culture will never be the same and neither will theirs. There’ll be a new culture in Lewiston that will incorporate elements of both and he should do what he can to encourage that because I think it will give Lewiston a better worldview of itself and others.
Dr. Lisa: Do you think that 1 of the reasons that people hold onto whatever they grew up with is a fear, a fear of moving into something unknown in the future?
Mark Dion: I think fear drives mostly everything we do. To be honest, whether it’s having to do with culture or even your own individual growth. If I look back at my life and I’m absolutely honest with myself, often times I held back because I was fearful. I wanted to plan everything out. I wanted to make sure that I minimized any potential risk and I forgot to enjoy the leap into something new. There’s a certain freefall that occurs in your life, whether it’s professional or personal and, rather than fear it, we should welcome it. When I go to Augusta, a lot of the conflict there is fear-based, trying to hold onto something that feels safe and comfortable. This resistance to change, and being torn by the idea that some part of your brain and your heart recognizes change has to occur. It’s a real struggle.
When you mention fear, I think it’s one of the driving elements in how we see ourselves, and how we engage others.
Dr. Lisa: My experience with you when I was the medical director at the county jail and we were going through a lot of difficulty with financing the medical care for the inmates because it was expensive and probably still is expensive, but there was a lot of friction at that time … Is that you always maintain a very pragmatic, yet positive view. Really, I always had the sense that you weren’t kind of locked down in your thinking, that you were open to trying to bring people in and experience their thoughts. Is that part of what’s enabled you to be successful?
Mark Dion: I think so. I think success is something I judge internally, so I feel if I can bring as many people to the issue as I can and we all learn something from their process, then that’s success. I don’t try to get caught up in stereotypes. Part of the problem with the jail was the idea that everybody should be punished and everybody is consistently evil, makes it easier to say no, as opposed to saying “Look, these are fellow human beings. They have needs. We have to meet those needs. We have to demonstrate the very behavior that we suspect is not existent in them”. In these 30 years dealing with “criminals”, I’ve found that there are people that can do incredibly good things and good people have done some incredibly bad things. Evil moves like an infection back and forth across many different individuals. I’m not so quick to judge. I think in 30 years, I would look back and say “Thank God I’ve deferred to Her to judge in the final analysis. My job is to try to respect and engage. I may learn something and they may learn something in the process too”.
So fighting or advocating for proper medical care, whether it was for physical disease or mental health, seemed to be what my duty was. It’s how you define responsibility, then once you do that for yourself, you get a lot of clarity. That’s something that really bothers me. You know from our prior lives at the jail. We’re quick to build jail cells. We’re not so quick to build therapeutic beds or we’re really reluctant to define many of our problems as they truly are, which are public health issues and not necessarily crime issues. We want to punish. We want to believe that people that are in the grips of addiction have a choice. Yet if you put a time line of an addict, there comes a point where rational decision making went out the window. It’s not fun anymore. They don’t want to do what they’re doing, but they’re absolutely compelled biologically and psychologically to do that. We don’t recognize that.
I’m not sure that a jail or prison is very therapeutic in the way it approaches those problems. If I was king of the world, for every jail cell, we need 10 beds in a hospital or medical setting. That truly looks at what’s going on out there. If we want to stop crime, we need to control and provide resources for addicted individuals. It’s the same with mental health. We put a lot of people that are mentally ill in jail and we think “That will work”, and you know and I know it doesn’t work; it aggravates the situation, but some parts of our community feel there’s been a victory there. We need to discuss with them and challenge them to revisit their thinking. Again, it’s fear: “I’m not like that. I don’t want to be like that. I want to make sure my children are not exposed to that because they may become like that”.
This is not a place that’s comfortable for them either. They’re as trapped as the addict. One is trapped by chemistry; the other one is trapped by their own thinking. We need to break it down on both sides.
Dr. Lisa: My experience is that, if you really dig deep, that it’s more the fear that they are like that that drives them or that they are, as John McCain has said multiple times and he has done work at Long Creek … And we had another interview where people were talking about those are just the people who get caught. My experience of people is that it’s their fear that they’re just 1 step away from getting caught, that there’s something underneath many times that they’re worried that they already are manifesting.
Mark Dion: I don’t disagree with that. I think we are most fearful of those individuals that display the very weakness that we have within ourselves and it’s a recognition of that, so we’re repulsed by who we are, not necessarily who they are. That’s what I’m saying, they don’t feel safe. The accuser doesn’t feel safe to look in the mirror either, but damn they want to make sure the offender does. I’m okay with that, but we need to turn the mirror on the community and start asking hard questions and give them a way to find an answer, so we do get justice.
Dr. Lisa: My experience also was that there is, I would say the vast majority of people that just made bad choices and really had bad family situations and had addictions and things going on, but there was this sliver of people that I encountered that I was truly concerned about because I think I did sense that there was some strange biological or psychological evil that existed. Something had turned in their brains. Is there room for that thinking in your paradigm?
Mark Dion: Sure. I’m a realist. There is a small number of men and women out there who pose a real risk to themselves first by their decision making and to all of us in the general community. Unfortunately, we may have to contain those individuals. That’s a whole other talk in how we do that, but the vast majority of people don’t fall in that category. Here’s an example. A few weeks ago, I went up to the state prison to visit with the men who are part of the hospice program there. When I walked in, one of the volunteers was somebody I helped to put in prison many years, so it was like a reunion. I saw immediately he had had a dramatic change. We would have said back then “He’s a sociopath. Had no conscience, no feeling for others and a true predator in every sense of the word”. I’ve helped put men like that in prison and I felt that I’d done my job at the time, so I’m conscious of that.
We spent some time talking and the changes I saw is he’s developed a capacity now for empathy. He, by seeing dying and actually embracing the reality of our own individual mortality, he’s come to appreciate what life is and how sacred it is. That’s done more for him being in this process than the idea that he’s got to do 10 or 15 years in a cage. We’ve achieved, not rehabilitation because there was no good to bring him back to because of the trajectory of his life, but we have achieved, with the hospice program, I think, a transformation. There’s always hope. It reinforced in me that even when I’ve concluded somebody is bad, incorrigible, that speaks to my own failing, that I’m still not willing on some level to talk the possibility that there is hope. This program provided hope and it’s provided some substantial transformation for this gentleman.
All the men in this were in for heinous crimes. One is serving a 62-year sentence, so we know the community said “You’re irretrievable and we’re going to put you in this box forever”, but in spite of that he has found a way to connect with humans on a level many of us will never connect with and because of that I think has been granted a gift that we can’t enjoy in terms of appreciating what life is. He’s learned that in a cage; maybe there’s a lesson there for us.
Dr. Lisa: It does seem very interesting that sometimes in order to find freedom, we have to be first confined.
Mark Dion: Yeah, they are free. Those men … They formed a little band. That’s how they decompress with the sick and dying in prison and their lyrics spoke to that. This role is connected to something greater than those walls. We can’t contain that. You can’t punish that. You can’t restrain that. They know that and I think they walk much more wracked emotionally than when they walked into that building the first time round. I think it’s a blessing for them and for the institution. The institution could learn a lot from them.
They had some PhD in Nursing study them and some men that do similar work in Louisiana. The consequence for the patients for them were better than those we paid to do the work out in the free world because out in the free world, on many levels it’s just a job. Even though you’re committed to the job, you go in, you’re done, you go home, you shut it down, for most of those types of professionals or employees. But these men live it. These are men that they’re caged with. The connection, the bond, goes on forever. They will stand at the graveside at the prison farm and put them in the ground. It was very powerful. I felt good. They made me feel good.
I went to a place where we think evil lives to learn something that was very, very good.
Dr. Lisa: I appreciate your spending the time talking with us today on the subject of freedom and the things that that has meant in the different errations of your life. We’ve been talking with former Sheriff and current State Representative and attorney Mark Dion. Thank you for coming in.
Mark Dion: Thank you, Lisa, very much.