by Matt Matheny

LD178 would have made all adults serving sentences longer than 5 years eligible for a parole hearing. What does this group of people look like, and what would happen if these criteria changed?

Catherine Besteman and Leo Hylton for the Justice Collaboratory (Yale Law School)

“Abolition” means different things to different people. To us, abolition is a process of working towards a society that prioritizes the healing of trauma, creating strong community bonds, investing in services and resources people need to live a healthy and dignified life, confronting and dismantling systems of oppression, and responding to harm with practices and processes of accountability and justice.

Linda Small describes the genesis of the F&C Curriculum Project and its impact on facilitators and the community as a chapter in the new book, Higher Education and the Carceral State: Transforming Together.

Linda Small and Chandler Dugal are formerly incarcerated Mainers and fellows of the Colby College Justice Think Tank. They are providing this column as a guest contribution for the Maine chapter of the national Scholars Strategy Network, which brings together scholars across the country to address public challenges and their policy implications. Members’ columns appear in the Bangor Daily News every other week.

Catherine Besteman and Leo Hylton for the Maine Law Review

The article argues that Maine incarcerates too many people, for too long, for too many things, at too great of an expense. We offer evidence to support this claim, briefly review some of the criminal legal legislation that shaped our present reality, and show how recent efforts at reform have been, at best, only modestly successful.

Catherine Besteman and Leo Hylton for The Bollard (January, February, and March 2023).

We present here a restorative pathway to decarceration and abolition for Maine. We believe this pathway can alleviate social problems and ensure community safety much more effectively than hyper-incarceration ever could. Our vision is far-reaching and unlikely to be fully realized in our lifetimes, but it includes many building blocks we can establish right now, providing a strong foundation for future generations to continue the work.

18 steps to decarceration in Maine — and it starts now! Excerpted from Leo Hylton and Catherine Besteman’s three-part essay, "Restorative Pathway to Decarceration and Abolition," originally published in the January, February and March 2023 issues of The Bollard.

Prior to the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, there were about 5000 people incarcerated in Maine and another 7000 under criminal justice supervision, including a disproportionate number of people of color. Even though Maine has the lowest violent crime rate and one of the lowest overall rates of incarceration in the U.S., Maine still incarcerates people at a higher rate than most countries in the world.

A primary issue of our contemporary era is mass incarceration. There are currently 2.2 million people incarcerated in the U.S., a 500% increase from a half century ago, at an annual cost of nearly $100 billion. The number of immigrants in detention in the U.S. has quintupled over the past 40 years and the number of immigrant detention centers has grown to over 200 because of new laws requiring mandatory detention of unauthorized immigrants.

What are the components of Maine’s criminal legal operations? How does the system work, from arrest, to bail, to finding a lawyer, to sentencing, to the policies and practices that determine and structure incarceration, to reentry?  These short essays, contributed by lawyers, advocates, currently and formerly incarcerated people, students, policy experts, and educators, break down Maine’s criminal justice operations. Together they tell a mosaic story of how carcerality operates in Maine.