Toward a Cage-Free Maine

Artwork by Christopher [surname redacted]. photo/John Ripton, courtesy Freedom & Captivity

A Restorative Pathway to Decarceration and Abolition 

Abolition means different things to different people. To some it references the struggle to end slavery in the United States during the decades before the Civil War. To others it represents freedom more broadly — a vision of a society free of injustice and oppression. And to another group it signals “anarchy,” the eradication of prisons and jails through a process that would cause violence and chaos. 

To us, abolition is creating a society that prioritizes the healing of trauma, fosters strong community bonds, invests in the services and resources people need to live a healthy and dignified life, confronts and dismantles systems of oppression, and responds to harm with accountability and justice. Abolition means putting together the support structures and harm-remediation programs that would make prisons and jails obsolete while making all of us safer and healthier. 

In short, abolition is a practice of decarceration — reducing the number of people in cages, both physical and electronic — that ultimately seeks to close prisons and jails, and end other forms of punitive confinement, by building a better society, one committed to safety and security for everyone. 

What does safety and security look like to you? 

To us it looks like affordable housing, health care and education for all. It looks like vibrant community centers with before- and after-school activities for kids. It looks like a society willing to confront the abuses of the past by acknowledging and repairing contemporary inequalities — inequalities rooted in slavery, sexism, and the brutal colonization of indigenous communities’ land. It looks like safe schools that encourage intellectual risk-taking, where students are free to pursue ideas that excite them, to question authority, and to develop the emotional and interpersonal skills they’ll need as adults. It looks like jobs that pay a fair wage and controls on corporate greed. It looks like Substance Use Disorder treatments that help, rather than criminalize, those who struggle with drug addiction. It looks like forms of social intervention that end generational cycles of domestic and sexual violence through healing and rehabilitation. And it looks like ending the gross inequality that’s led to impoverishment and precarity for the majority and obscene riches for a privileged few. 

What will this vision actually require in practice? 

We know the United States is the world’s biggest jailer, with 5 percent of the global population yet 25 percent of the world’s prisoners. We know the U.S. cages a disproportionately high number of people of color, with Black people incarcerated at five times the rate of white people. We know the rate by which women are incarcerated has skyrocketed during the past two decades, primarily due to crimes related to drug use or possession. We know that more punitive laws — not rising crime rates — drove the 222 percent increase in the rate of incarceration in state prisons between 1980 and 2010. 

Nationally, one out of every 20 adults experiences some form of incarceration each year, and every other person in the U.S. has had a close relative put behind bars. Prison sentences in the U.S. are far longer, on average, than in all other countries. We have one of the highest recidivism (return to incarceration) rates in the world. We are one of the only countries on Earth that sentences people to “Death By Incarceration” (life sentences without the possibility of parole); 80 percent of all the people sentenced to Death By Incarceration are imprisoned in this country. Our government spends twice as much on police, prisons and courts than on income supplements, food stamps and related public-assistance programs combined. 

We obviously have a massive, and worsening, incarceration problem, yet we keep pouring more public money into this hopelessly failed system. Why? As a report by Florida State researchers put it, “What other social intervention has a cost of over $50 billion annually [some experts estimate it’s actually $80 billion], a failure rate of 60% to 75%, and has been tolerated for nearly four decades?” 

It’s time for a change. This is how we can make it happen. 

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. 

We offer our vision in three parts: BEFORE (things that need to happen to build safe, healthy communities while keeping people out of cages); MIDDLE (things that need to happen within prisons and jails to turn them into spaces of healing and rehabilitation, rather than punishment and harm); and AFTER (things that need to happen to ensure those freed from confinement successfully rejoin their communities). The BEFORE recommendations appear in this issue, and the MIDDLE and AFTER parts will be published in the February and March issues of The Bollard. We applaud the steps being taken toward some of these goals by Maine’s Department of Corrections (DOC) and by some of Maine’s forward-thinking prosecutors, knowing that we all share the goal of living in a just and secure society. 

Whether we personally experience it or not, we are all affected by the societal plague of mass incarceration. In Maine, about 7,000 people are under the direct control of the DOC. Our state’s prisons hold between 1,600 to 2,400 people on any given day, while Maine jails confine another 2,000. Roughly 40,000 people, held behind bars prior to court appearances, cycle through Maine jails every single year. 

In 2021, 694 more people were imprisoned in Maine — almost two per day. Nearly half (45 percent) of those sentences were for probation violations, usually for behavior that would be legal were the person not on probation, like drinking an alcoholic beverage or failing to attend a substance-use treatment class that costs money they don’t have. In addition to those behind bars, there are about 5,400 Mainers under some form of DOC supervision in their community: approximately 4,200 people are under what is called “active probation,” required to engage in treatment or education and report to their probation officer on a regular basis, and roughly 1,200 others are on “passive probation,” allowed to live more freely, but still required to occasionally check in with their probation officer, and their probation status can be changed to “active” at any time. 

Maine’s incarceration rates, like those nationwide, are racially unbalanced. Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) comprise 6 percent of our state’s population, but 20 percent of those incarcerated in Maine. Black people comprise 2 percent of Maine’s population, but 11 percent of Maine’s incarcerated population, and 12 percent of those serving life/virtual life sentences in Maine. 

On a positive note, the number of people in Maine’s prisons has been decreasing since 2018, and the number of people released in 2021 (769) was greater than the number who entered. With just over 7,000 people currently ensnared in Maine’s carceral system, we have a real opportunity to winnow our cages out of existence. When we look at California’s mass release of 3,500 people in 2020, or the recent move by Oregon Gov. Kate Brown to give clemency to 1,147 people, we see a reason for hope in Maine. There was no spike in violence or crime when those releases took place. Given the relatively small (and shrinking) number of prisoners in Maine, abolition is possible here through safe, intentional, structured practices of rehabilitation and liberation.  

BEFORE 

Social scientists know, based on copious evidence, what policies work to interrupt harm, build safe communities and minimize the number of people sentenced to jail or prison time. Caging people seldom accomplishes the goal of making communities safer; in fact, evidence indicates that spending time behind bars is traumatic, breeds more criminal behavior, and does little to reduce recidivism. In short, there is no evidence that incarceration reduces illegal behavior, and plenty of evidence that it makes crime worse. 

While we will always need ways to separate those who are causing serious physical harm, using jails and prisons to address a wide range of social problems is not only ineffective, it’s counterproductive. It drains desperately needed public resources from our communities, and the associated financial, psychological and social costs are enormous, practically beyond measure. Developing alternative responses to harm and investing in the services and resources that build truly safe neighborhoods are essential pathways toward a better future for all. 

Invest in Youth. We can all agree that kids need to feel safe in their neighborhoods, heard and nurtured in their schools, loved in their families and healthy in their bodies. Right now, we are failing by every one of those measures. 

One in five Maine kids is food insecure; the new state program giving free school lunches to all students reflects the depth of the childhood hunger crisis. One in 12 Maine children lacks health insurance. One-fifth of Maine youth are involved in the criminal punishment, welfare or state behavioral-modification systems, are homeless, or are chronically absent from school. Fifteen percent of Maine youth fail to graduate from high school and 14 percent live in poverty. 

This is devastating. We can, and must, do better! To break the school-to-prison pipeline that condemns so many children to a life of cyclical imprisonment, we need to do the following: 

• Implement Restorative Justice practices in all schools to replace disciplinary systems that rely on punishment, suspension, expulsion and policing. Maine spends about $12,500 to educate one student for one school year, but $530,181 to incarcerate someone under the age of 18 for a year.It is far better to invest in restorative justice approaches for kids than to cage them. Teach our kids the importance of accountability and repair instead of punishment and separation.
• Reform school curricula. Forty percent of the people in Maine prisons failed to graduate from high school. We should ensure every child has access to curricula that reflect their experience in society, feed their curiosity and emotional growth, teach financial literacy, and grapple in meaningful, effective and hopeful ways with injustices in our national history. Our children are capable of handling hard truths and complexity. Our job is to provide them support and guidance, while modeling courageous compassion and understanding along the way.
• Provide free or affordable higher education to everyone who wants it. Maine’s community colleges cost under $15,000 a year; imprisoning someone costs up to $74,000 a year.Private colleges and universities should extend targeted scholarships to those negatively impacted by our criminal punishment system. For the cost of incarcerating one person, we could educate — and potentially break the cycle of incarceration for — five people.
• Fund community centers that provide credible mentors; free health, dental and psychiatric care; gardening, arts and trade programs; nutritious food and nutrition education; and enriching before- and after-school activities. Youth need to feel that their communities care about them; investing in places that are dedicated to their health and success is a powerful way to express that care. 
• Provide extra supports for kids with incarcerated parents. Between January of 2015 and May of 2020, there were 3,403 children in Maine with a parent in prison, a statistic that does not include parents in county jails or on probation. Having an incarcerated parent is traumatic — what psychologists call an Adverse Childhood Experience — and is related to increased levels of homelessness, mental health problems, behavioral challenges, low educational attainment and heightened risk of crime. Children with incarcerated parents are six times more likely to become incarcerated themselves. We shouldn’t live in a society where children suffer as a result of the state’s punishment of their parents.
• Eradicate juvenile incarceration and replace it with community-based supportive housing and a statewide restorative justice diversion program for youth — one run by restorative justice professionals, not by law enforcement or the DOC. Diversion for juveniles should be the norm, because evidence shows that diversion, rather than incarceration, reduces the likelihood of another arrest, incarceration or violent act, and increases graduation rates and earnings in adulthood. Let’s start treating other people’s children the way we would want them to treat ours when kids (almost inevitably) make poor choices and cause harm as they try to navigate the dangerous road to adulthood. 
• Extend diversion-over-incarceration practices to young adults between 18 and 27, following the lead of efforts in states like California, Delaware, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York and Utah. Until 1976, when our state’s approach to public safety took a sharply punitive turn, the maximum sentence for those up to 28 years old convicted of any crime in Maine was three years. As a mountain of evidence has accumulated proving harsh punishments do nothing to deter crime, why has our legal system become more punitive over the past half-century? 

Invest in Families and Communities. Maine families are increasingly stressed by high food, housing and heating costs, skyrocketing levels of anxiety and depression (greatly worsened since the pandemic began, and compounded by substance abuse), a lack of decent and affordable child care, low wages, and a dysfunctional health-insurance system so awful that un-payable medical bills are the number one cause of bankruptcy in the U.S. All these social pressures, plus the myriad personal challenges people face from day to day, make it a struggle just to maintain a basic level of health and financial security. 

A recent public opinion poll conducted by Vera Action, a justice reform organization, showed that nearly three-quarters of the 3,876 voters surveyed define “safe communities” as those that invest in good jobs, schools, housing, health care and infrastructure, rather than in more police, jails and prisons. Recognizing the causal connection between lack of physical wellness and crime, we can see that most crimes are acts of need or perceived need, so a top social priority must be ensuring that everyone’s basic human needs are met. We need to shift funds from corrections and policing to social supports that meet basic needs, including reliable public transportation and internet access. Imagine the social and economic benefits Maine would realize were we to spend even some of the $55,000 to $74,000 cost of incarcerating one person for one year on support for a family in need instead? 

• Invest in jobs. Mandate a living wage for all. Maine’s minimum wage is $12.75/hour, while a living wage for a single adult with no children is estimated at $17.88/hour. 
• Invest in housing. Approximately 25,000 people are currently on a wait list in Maine for Section 8 housing vouchers. It should not be so hard for people to secure housing! According to a recent report by the ACLU of Maine (“A Better Path for Maine: The case for decriminalizing drugs”), it costs more than twice as much to incarcerate someone in state prison than it would cost to provide them with “housing, weekly counseling, and medication-assisted treatment for a year at current MaineCare reimbursement rates.” 
• Invest in health care. Universal health care — c’mon, already! 
• Build a mental health response network. The U.S. has some of the world’s highest rates of suicide, depression and anxiety, but fewer mental health practitioners per capita than other industrialized countries. Canada, Switzerland and Australia have twice as many mental health professionals per 100,000 people as the U.S. has. To correct this deficit, we need to redirect funding from police to care workers, mental health responders, and drug counseling and treatment professionals. 
• Expand free access to substance-use-disorder treatment programs. According to that ACLU report, “Between 2014 and 2019, inflation-adjusted spending on substance use treatment through the MaineCare system increased 2 percent. However, over the same period, state and local spending on corrections increased 13 percent, while spending on police enforcement increased 14 percent.” And according to the Maine Recovery Advocacy Project, Maine currently has just two detox centers, with a total of only 20 beds, available to people who are uninsured.

The vast majority of incarcerated mothers in Maine are sentenced for drug infractions. Due to the length of their sentences, many lose custody of their children while behind bars, unnecessarily causing trauma to both parent and child. Making affordable drug treatment, as an alternative to incarceration, available to everyone will keep families together, and it’s a vastly more effective response to the crisis of substance abuse than prison cells or probation officers. 

• Invest in transportation infrastructure and services. Limited or complete lack of access to transportation severely impacts people’s lives. Maine cities once had affordable and efficient public trolley and rail networks, but investment in public transportation withered last century as lobbyists for car and fossil-fuel companies pushed for policies that encouraged sprawl and individual vehicle ownership. There is an absurdly long list of traffic violations for which police can pull over vehicles to conduct searches, and traffic stops have become an engine of incarceration. Let’s reverse that trend. 
• Transform foster care. Too often, children are either left in homes when they should be removed, or removed when they should be left at home and supported there, instead. When children are neglected or abused, the cause is typically a mental health problem or unaddressed trauma in the life of the person causing them harm. There are some situations in which children are legitimately at risk and must be removed from a home for their own safety, but such separations should not be mandated. Maine needs to explore and adopt what’s called a “mandated supporting model,” which keeps children with their families while providing meaningful services and resources to struggling caregivers. We should also develop a risk/needs assessment that takes into account the racial bias that speeds the removal of children from BIPOC and impoverished families. For cases in which the lack of resources to support a child is due to a lack of access to education, training, transportation or employment, there needs to be support provided to meet these basic needs, not punishments and mandates demanding the caregiver attain things beyond their grasp. 

Decriminalize People and Demilitarize Systems. As of 2017, the number of Mainers in jail had increased by 649 percent since 1970, and the prison population had increased 151 percent since 1983. Politicians promoted mass incarceration as essential to protect communities from violence, but much of the steep rise in incarceration is due to new or tougher laws against drug possession or sale, not violence, as well as new statutes criminalizing non-violent actions and behaviors that were previously outside the purview of the courts. Although Maine’s prison population is currently decreasing, this follows the period between 2012 and 2018 when prison admissions in Maine shot up by 34 percent. The increased criminalization of addiction, poverty and homelessness has happened while investments in policing and corrections have been rising at a significantly higher rate than funding for subsidized housing, drug counseling and treatment, health care and other social programs. Contrary to the political rhetoric of a citizenry under siege, the vast majority of emergency calls to the police are for situations unrelated to crime, physical harm or violence, and thus should be handled by professionals with expertise in mental health crises, substance-use disorder and social work. Given the relatively low crime rate in Maine, this shift in focus and resourcing is more than feasible.

• Decriminalize drugs. From 1980 to 2015, the number of women in Maine jails increased 1,981 percent and the number in state prison by 794 percent. The dramatic rise in the number of women behind bars is primarily due to drug laws; Maine’s DOC reports that 72 percent of women in their prison are convicted of drug-related charges. Class A drug arrests doubled between 2008 and 2018, and in 2021, almost 40 percent of all people entering prison were convicted of furnishing, possessing or illegally importing drugs. According to the ACLU report, Maine spends $111 million every year to arrest, detain and sentence people who use drugs. The report states: “Maine’s law enforcement spends $8,427 alone for each drug-related arrest. This amount could cover seven months of rent in Cumberland County, two-thirds of the cost of educating a public school student for a whole year, or four months of intensive outpatient treatment for someone on MaineCare.” Instead of incarcerating people who use drugs, Maine needs to make drug counseling and medication-assisted treatment widely available and easily accessible. 
• Decriminalize sex work and houselessness. In both cases, the people being punished are often victims of crime and harm. Rather than criminalizing survival behaviors, Maine needs to provide supports and protections against sexual and financial exploitation — without using this as a way to expand reasons to jail people.
• Decriminalize undocumented status (and end aggressive immigration enforcement in Maine) so families with a mix of members with and without papers don’t live in fear and can benefit from the social services that are funded with their tax dollars, but which they are not allowed to access. 
• Prioritize alternatives to incarceration. Nationwide, only 10 to 15 percent of court cases go to trial; the rest are decided through a plea deal. We need to change the presumption that such deals must involve some amount of incarceration and instead prioritize alternatives, caging people only as a last resort, when absolutely necessary for public safety. 
• Demilitarize the police and transform police culture from the inside out. Across the U.S., $7 billion’ worth of decommissioned military equipment has been transferred to local police departments, including forces here in Maine. Maine has the highest rate of fatal police shootings in New England. All police shootings since 1990 (over 170 in all) have been deemed justified by Maine’s Attorneys General. 
• Fund and construct non-police crisis response systems for people facing mental health challenges so law enforcement does not have to become involved in medical emergencies. 
• Revise the Maine Criminal Code to remove mandatory minimums, “truth in sentencing” laws and sentencing enhancements that keep people locked up for far too long. The American Bar Association states that sentences exceeding 10 years do not deter crime and do more harm than good. Almost a quarter of the people in Maine’s prisons are serving sentences longer than a decade. There are some 1,100 statutes on the books in Maine that carry minimum sentences or fines, all of which should be reviewed, reduced and/or repealed.
• Build an effective public defender system. Maine is the only state in the U.S. without one, relying instead on unregulated and unsupervised court-appointed attorneys to represent poor people accused of crimes. As the Portland Press Herald reported last August, half of the 23,655 open cases in Maine were assigned to just 33 lawyers. Eleven of these lawyers have more than 301 open cases each. There are only 163 lawyers in Maine accepting new cases from the courts. Maine is failing to meet our constitutional obligations to ensure defendants receive adequate legal counsel. 
• Eliminate cash bail. Limit the kinds of offenses that require pre-trial incarceration and establish the presumption of pre-trial release. A 2019 Maine Law Review article calls Maine’s bail system “antiquated, problematic, and arguably unconstitutional.” Cash bail has already been eliminated for the most minor crimes, like littering, but with 40,000 people cycling through jail every year because they cannot afford bail, more needs to be done. In 2014, 70 percent of the people in Maine’s jails were there awaiting their day in court.  
• Reform probation policies to ensure minor violations do not result in reincarceration. As previously noted, in recent years close to half of all prison admissions were for probation revocations. 

Build community-based safety and responses to harm. Much of the language about abolition and transformative justice looks to the community to address harms. These days, we live in a society, but society is not the same as community; it’s the difference between people living with each other, not just beside one another. We have to rebuild our sense of neighborly solidarity, reverse the onslaught of new laws that cage our neighbors, and develop practices to both support people who have been harmed and hold those who have caused harm accountable. Our approach must be restorative, not punitive. 

A recent report from the Alliance for Justice and Safety, titled “Crime Survivors Speak,” reveals that those who have experienced violent harm are not healed when the person who hurt them is sent to prison. Instead, they want a justice system that centers their need for healing, effectively addresses what caused the harm in the first place, and relies on community-based interventions, rather than incarceration, to ensure the person who caused the harm does not harm them or others again. Maine is a small-town state, so reestablishing community here is well within our reach.

• Research the factors that drive contact with the criminal legal system and incarceration. Mainers need to know how our law enforcement, courts, sentencing and corrections institutions are working. District attorneys should build data dashboards to report on arrests and decisions about diversion, prosecution and sentencing. Maine’s colleges and universities can offer analysis of this data and engage the public in constructive discussion about current practices. 
• Create individual and community/neighborhood safety plans. Interpersonal harm happens; it is part of the human experience. Safety is a basic human need, and we all have roles to play in keeping ourselves and others safe. Each of us has the ability to create a safety plan to respond to interpersonal harm without involving the police. And, while situations involving domestic and sexual violence are more sensitive and complex, models exist for survivors and supporters to promote safety while taking account of power disparities and marginalization. “Where there is no guidance, a people falls, but in an abundance of counselors there is safety.” (Proverbs 11:14)
• Form community-building circles throughout the state via community-based restorative justice organizations. These circles strengthen interpersonal bonds by bolstering our sense of collective responsibility and belonging, making harm and crime less likely. 
• Develop an effective response to domestic violence and sexual abuse. Most people experiencing intimate partner violence do not call the police due to fear of retaliation, abuse from the police and the criminal legal system, fear, shame, and/or financial or housing insecurity if their abuser goes to jail. The carceral responses to domestic violence promoted since the 1970s are not working; we are not incarcerating our way out of appalling levels of domestic violence and sexual abuse.We need to develop new approaches that involve much more robust ways to keep those being harmed safe through housing, financial support and trauma-informed interventions, while also finding new ways to interrupt the behavior of those causing harm through effective transformative justice and accountability interventions. 
• Build the capacity of organizations to support Restorative Justice Conferencing. Restorative Justice Conferencing guides harmed people and the people who harmed them through a process of meaningful accountability and repair. The person who caused harm is required to take responsibility for their actions and seek to repair that harm as much as possible. The person harmed attains a better understanding of why the harm happened and is supported in their healing journey. A reparative agreement is created and a monitor assigned to remind the person who caused the harm of the obligation they created and to support them in completing the agreement.
• Create restorative options for addressing harm that are not restricted to victim-offender conferencing. A leading prosecutor and founder of Fair and Just Prosecution writes that there are four models of how to implement restorative options in the wake of interpersonal harm: 1. Pre-charge diversion through community courts; 2. Restorative justice responses to violence and serious crimes; 3. Court-embedded restorative justice; and 4. In-house prosecutorial restorative justice. Each approach is designed to center both accountability and healing. Avenues of true accountability succeed where incarceration continues to fail: they lead to a reduction in recidivism, increased victim satisfaction, and avoidance of familial and community harm resulting from incarceration.
• Build a transformative justice alternative to incarceration that centers the healing and recovery of victims of violence, modeled on Common Justice in New York and the Alliance for Safety and Justice. 
• Elect and support DAs who are committed to restorative justice and diversion pathways to harm reduction. Reach out to your local DA to let them know you support those alternatives.  
• Enact sane gun laws. A primary reason crime rates in the U.S. are so much higher than those in other countries is easy access to guns. To start: raise the minimum age to purchase guns and ban assault rifles without criminalizing and incarcerating those in possession of the weapons. Confiscate and dispose of the weapons without disposing of the people who have them. 
• Promote public outreach efforts to explain and grow visions about justice, repair, community accountability and transformative justice possibilities. Maine Inside Out, Freedom & Captivity, Transform Harm, FAMM, Project NIA, Critical Resistance, Fair and Just Prosecution, It’s Time to Listen, and Justice Radio are examples. 
• Create community “hubs” for cross-race and -class conversations to facilitate dialogue and reflexive self-growth. (Examples are the Maine Humanities Council book discussion groups and the programs offered by Wabanaki REACH, Indigo Arts Alliance, and Atlantic Black Box). 
• Launch a Truth Telling initiative for police violence and racist injustices, following the example of the Maine Wabanaki-State Child Welfare Truth and Reconciliation Commission, to create an accurate history that takes account of institutionalized and systemic historic harms. 
• Open opportunities for storytelling about personal experiences with harm, incarceration, accountability and repair so we can listen to each other and learn from each other’s experiences. 
• Recognize tribal sovereignty. A recent report details the enduring and profound economic damage to Maine’s Wabanaki communities caused by the restrictions on self-government included in the 1980 land claims settlement agreement. Although the Maine legislature voted to repeal the restrictions last year, Gov. Janet Mills refused to sign the bill into law. 

Confront growing wealth inequality. As many Mainers are acutely aware, we live in a time of extreme wealth and income inequality, and the gap between the haves and have-nots is growing. That’s important to this discussion because higher inequality within a society is positively correlated with higher rates of violent crime. Today, 10 percent of U.S. households hold 76 percent of all national wealth. As of late 2021, the top 1 percent of U.S. residents held more wealth ($45.9 trillion) than the middle 60 percent of the population ($35.7 trillion).  

In Maine, the wealthiest 5 percent of households earn 10.7 times as much, on average, as the bottom 20 percent of households, and more than four times as much as the middle 20 percent. Thirteen percent of Mainers live under the poverty line, and the percentage of very young children living in poverty is as high as 37 percent in Aroostook County. We need to confront this obscene inequality to create a more just society. Children shouldn’t continue to wonder where their next meal is going to come from because we refuse to reckon with the disparities that lie at the heart of our economy.

• Revise the tax code. The contemporary wealth gap is unprecedented in this country and largely due to inherited wealth and low tax rates on corporate assets and capital gains. This is a ridiculous and perpetually harmful way to run an economy, but it can easily be addressed by raising tax rates on those most able to afford it, repealing tax giveaways for corporations and the rich, and imposing targeted new taxes like a levy on stock transactions. 
• Reduce corporate control of real estate, impose rent control, and invest in housing for poor and middle-income families. 
• Support alternative forms of ownership by supporting community-based land trusts, cooperatively owned agricultural and residential property, and alternative economic networks (time banks, cooperative finance, etc). 
• Rethink public financing. Transform the systems and entities we run a deficit to pay for. Every year, Congress allocates more money than requested by the military, while refusing to fund education, housing, health care, child care and other reparative public goods at necessary and life-sustaining levels. Mainers can fight to reverse these misguided national spending priorities. 

If we are going to begin the long, dedicated process of starving the carceral system out of existence in Maine, we can start right now by focusing our efforts on investing in our youth, investing in families and communities, decriminalizing people and demilitarizing systems, building community-based safety and responses to harm, and reversing growing wealth inequality. Rather than say, “tear it all down and figure it out from there,” we are taking an approach to decarceration and abolition that focuses energies on building restorative avenues of meaningful accountability, repair and healing. If we are going to build safety into Maine’s communities, we need to build community first.

Now that you’ve read the first part of this Pathway, take a moment to process this information. Then scan back over the headings and bullet points. What stands out to you as a feasible point of entry? Where do you see yourself in this leg of the journey? What can you do from where you are, with what you have, to help Maine take a step toward a more safe and healthy future? Who do you know that could help you take that step? Call them right now!

Leo Hylton is a recent Master’s graduate of George Mason University’s Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution, currently incarcerated at Maine State Prison. His education and work are focused on Social Justice Advocacy and Activism, with a vision toward an abolitionist future. You can reach him at: Leo Hylton #70199, 807 Cushing Rd., Warren, ME 04864, or leoshininglight@gmail.com.

Catherine Besteman is an abolitionist educator at Colby College. Her research and practice engage the public humanities to explore abolitionist possibilities in Maine. In addition to the Freedom & Captivity initiative, she has researched and published on security, militarism, displacement, and community-based activism and transformation, focused on Somalia, South Africa, and the U.S. Her recent work has been supported by fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations.