WINDHAM (AP) – A taste of freedom on Friday awaited a Maine State Prison inmate who once described himself to a judge as a “ticking time bomb.”
The Maine Department of Corrections and Department of Health and Human Services, along with the judge and prosecutors, have worked together to come up with a plan designed to help Norman Dickinson enjoy success outside prison.
But the plan nearly disintegrated when a landlord reneged on an agreement to let Dickinson live in an apartment in Portland.
Unable to come up with another apartment within 24 hours, state officials developed an 11th-hour alternative in which he’ll be released Friday into a mobile home parked on the property of the Maine Correctional Center in Windham, said Denise Lord, spokeswoman for the Department of Corrections in Augusta.
The convicted kidnapper will be wearing electronic monitoring that utilizes global positioning to track his movements, and he’ll be under 24-hour supervision by probation officers for the first couple of days, Lord said.
He also faces other restrictions: no drugs, no alcohol and no pornography, along with continued sex offender counseling, she said.
Dickinson was convicted of kidnapping and car theft in 1989, and was sentenced to 20 years in prison, with all but 10 years suspended. Under the old “good time” laws, he was eligible for release on probation in 1997.
But he has run into problems on the outside. He smashed a television in a pre-release center in 1997, slipped out of a halfway house for a beer in 1999 and broke the rules in two supervised apartments in 2000 and 2001.
Assembling a team to develop plans for high-risk inmates like Dickinson is a new technique being used in Maine, Lord said.
But it’s ultimately up to Dickinson whether he succeeds. In the past, it seemed almost as if he’d rather stay in prison.
“We can only hold people for the period of their sentence. The objective is to try to transition him back into the community in an appropriate way. He obviously has to be willing to do that,” Lord said.
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