Improving Maine’s Prisons

Every day, prison officials face the question of how to maintain security while preparing incarcerated people to lead productive and law-abiding lives when they return to their communities.¹ Immediate safety concerns and harsh punishment often take precedence over incarcerated people’s long-term needs.²

As a result, prisons control what incarcerated people wear, eat, and do.³ Correctional staff oversee sleep and hygiene schedules, movement, and exercise. They determine what goods, jobs, and services people can access. At the same time, prisons often lack the resources to address the underlying factors that bring people into the criminal justice system in the first place.⁴ Upon release, many people struggle to reintegrate into their communities, and they frequently return to prison, often because the very circumstances that got them there — substance use, mental illness, unemployment, lack of education — were left unaddressed on reentry.⁵ Corrections staff, meanwhile, experience adverse effects from working in prisons, including negative health outcomes and lower life expectancy.⁶

But there is another way. Recognizing how traditional prisons fail, some state correctional systems are reconsidering their approaches.⁷ By prioritizing support and rehabilitation, most have seen safer facilities and lower recidivism rates.⁸

Maine has pioneered one of the more promising prison reform initiatives.⁹ Following a 2011 legislative oversight report that detailed harsh conditions in solitary confinement, pressure to change course came from both inside and outside the Maine Department of Corrections (MDOC).¹⁰ Correctional officials, incarcerated people, and advocates collaborated to develop a new model focused on rehabilitation rather than punishment.

In 2022, MDOC formalized this novel approach to corrections statewide, emphasizing “rehabilitation, mutual respect, human dignity, and community reintegration.”¹¹ In place of harsh control measures and ever-increasing security measures, MDOC encouraged staff to build positive relationships with incarcerated people, who are called residents.¹² To foster rehabilitation, MDOC invested in job training, educational and vocational programs, and behavioral health treatment, overcoming budget constraints and a challenging political landscape.¹³

With approval from MDOC, the Brennan Center conducted independent research in three of its larger facilities, which together hold two-thirds of Maine’s incarcerated population.¹⁴ We surveyed 350 incarcerated people and 117 security and program staff to understand their perceptions of life and work behind bars. We administered the surveys in October 2024 to residents of the Maine State Prison and staff across all facilities and in March 2025 to residents of the Maine Correctional Center and the Women’s Center (see figure 1). These facilities include both intake sites for people recently sentenced and secure sites for people serving longer sentences. We followed up with in-depth discussions with more than 200 people, including correctional leaders, officers, program staff, incarcerated people, and advocates. In addition, we reviewed administrative records that begin in 2017, several years before the Maine Model of Corrections was formally launched, and run through 2024. While we cannot yet draw causal conclusions about the impact of the Maine Model, this preliminary data is encouraging.

Between 2017 and 2024, rates of violence in Maine prisons fell by 36 percent and rates of staff use of force fell by 69 percent. Recidivism rates for people released in 2014 compared with 2022 fell from 31 percent to 23 percent. Behind these marked improvements are promising indicators of quality of life inside Maine’s prisons. Most survey respondents — 67 percent of incarcerated men, 59 percent of incarcerated women, and 73 percent of staff — reported feeling safe in their facilities. Majorities also reported that they have adequate space for exercise and ways to connect with their families.

Still, there is much room for improvement. A core tenet of the Maine Model is that corrections staff should treat incarcerated people with respect, yet only 30 percent of incarcerated men and 43 percent of incarcerated women agreed that staff do so. Similarly, only 21 percent of incarcerated men and 34 percent of incarcerated women agreed that MDOC believes in the centrality of rehabilitation, even as an overwhelming 78 percent of staff said that rehabilitation is central to their mission. Notably, incarcerated men’s and women’s overall perceptions follow similar trends. However, incarcerated women perceive their conditions differently from incarcerated men in several respects. They are far less likely to perceive their facility as calm, and they rate their health care and reentry preparation even more poorly than men do.

Taken as a whole, this research reveals that the Maine Model is off to a strong start, but there is still much work to do to realize its goals. MDOC should redouble its efforts to improve housing options, disciplinary and grievance systems, programming for incarcerated people, and training for staff. It will be most effective if it consults incarcerated people and staff alike as it continues to develop and implement reforms. Other states, meanwhile, would do well to look toward the Maine Model as they consider how their prisons might better achieve safety and rehabilitation.