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Mentally Incompetent Maine Defendants Sent to South Carolina Wellpath Lockup Called “Essentially Prison”
Pre-trial detainees found not criminally responsible in Maine are being quietly transferred from the state’s Riverview Psychiatric Center in Augusta to Columbia Regional Care Center, a South Carolina psychiatric lockup owned by Wellpath, Inc. Wellpath has filed for federal bankruptcy court protection, as reported elsewhere in this issue. [See: PLN, Jan. 2025, p.1.]
In the fiscal year ending on June 30, 2024, the Maine Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) spent $53.8 million to run Riverview and another $1.2 million on six treatment beds at Columbia. Just a month earlier, 29 of 92 licensed beds at Riverview were empty.
DHHS spokesperson Lindsay Hammes said that those sent south had “demonstrated a high level of violence” or assaulted other staff and patients. But transferees reported harsher conditions at Columbia than at Riverview: more isolation and less privacy from omnipresent guards, as well as increased use of restraints and limited access to treatment and activities.
Anthony Reed, the first Maine defendant sent to the South Carolina lockup in 2015, died there in December 2023; DHHS has released no information about the death, except that Reed was 48. His transfer had already raised the eyebrows of an Augusta judge, as well as his father, who begged state lawmakers in 2019 to investigate Columbia. Another Maine detainee, James Staples, 67, died at Columbia in 2018, a year after he pried out an eyeball at Maine State Prison, prompting the transfer.
Malcolm Moore, 50, who was found not guilty of fatally stabbing a neighbor by reason of insanity, spent 10 years confined at Riverview before he was shipped to Columbia in 2022 for refusing his medication for paranoid schizophrenia. Said his court-appointed attorney, Hank Hainke, “These people are essentially in prison.”
But detainees like Reed, Staples and Moore have no say in their transfers and limited communication with attorneys, raising due-process concerns. “They haven’t been sentenced [to the South Carolina lockup],” Hainke pointed out. “It’s illegal to just put someone in a prison.”
Source: Portland Press Herald
