A surprisingly contentious primary is being waged for the position of Cumberland County sheriff between the incumbent, Kevin Joyce, who has filled the role for four years, and Michael Edes, a retired veteran state trooper.

Joyce is being challenged Tuesday by Edes in the Democratic primary for Cumberland County sheriff. No other parties have a candidate running for the post; the deadline to file is Tuesday.

Joyce was elected sheriff in 2010, after serving as chief deputy under Sheriff Mark Dion since 2003, and has been with the sheriff ’s office for 27 years. He graduated from the Maine Criminal Justice Academy, has an associate degree from Southern Maine Technical College, a bachelor’s in business administration and master’s from Husson College. Joyce also attended the FBI National Academy in 2004; he has received several awards over the years.

Joyce said that the law enforcement side of the Cumberland County Sheriff ’s Department is in the midst of an accreditation process. The jail is already accredited. Maine doesn’t have a state accreditation process, so Cumberland County Sheriff ’s Office is moving toward national accreditation. “It’s a voluntary program,” Joyce said. “But you wouldn’t send your child to an unaccredited school or take him to an unaccredited hospital — why should law enforcement be different?”

There are 179 standards the county must meet to become accredited. Next year, they will be observed by people from law enforcement nationwide to review the policies of the department and observe whether the policies are being followed.

“It’s one thing to say we have a policy that everyone has to wear a seat belt,” Joyce said. “But are the policies being followed?”

Joyce said that he would also increase outreach to young students and children of parents who are at risk in some way, and make sure they get a good start in school.

“We want them to become a good student so that at age 18 they don’t end up in jail,” he said.

Joyce said that the department wrote a grant for $600,000 to partner with halfway houses, mental health providers, people who offer work to former inmates, and drug and alcohol abuse centers to help inmates as they are being released.

“We’ve never done prerelease planning,” he said. “We open the door and hope for the best, but what we’re finding is that they end up in jail again, often. The Cumberland County Jail is Maine’s largest mental health hospital, and we were never designed for that purpose.”

Joyce hopes that by helping former inmates find assistance on the outside, there will be less recidivism.

He also is concerned about the growing number of scams targeting senior citizens.

“We have to keep seniors informed and educated,” Joyce said. “Otherwise they get separated from their hard-earned retirement nest egg.”

His opponent in this race, Michael Edes, has been in law enforcement for 35 years, 28 of that with the state police, but he started his career as a Cumberland County Sheriff ’s Deputy. Edes retired in January in order to run for sheriff. He has an associate degree in law enforcement from Orono, receiving several awards over the years. He has also served as president of the Maine State Trooper’s Association, and has dealt with labor and management issues, working with management on contract and employment issues for the last 20 years. The Patrol Deputies Union has endorsed Edes; the Corrections Union declined to endorse either candidate.

“I am hoping to be able to do more with outreach, and alternative sentencing programs,” he said. “It would save the taxpayers money. I’m also looking forward to working with additional mental health and drug treatment programs, both inside and outside the jail.

“We also need to be more involved in early childhood prevention programs,” Edes added.

He would like to develop a program that would work with veterans and drug abusers, modeled on the Kennebec County Drug Court, in which people who reoffend while on probation or bail are offered a chance to enter drug treatment facilities rather than going back to jail. Edes says he would extend that to veterans, to deal with some conditions, such as PTSD, that are common among vets who commit crimes. He would also work to set up a program by which people who are in jail because they couldn’t pay fines get the chance to work off the fine, rather than go to jail.

Edes has had no experience within the county jail.

In an interview with the Lakes Region Weekly earlier this year, Edes said that he joined the race because morale at the sheriff ’s department has declined in recent years, a concern he reiterated on Friday. He credited that to a “top-down” approach to management by Joyce, ignoring the suggestions of corrections officers and deputies in the field.

“You know, all the feedback I get is that when labor tells management or suggests different ways, management totally, totally ignores it, and keeps doing the same old, same old,” he said in the Lakes Region article.

Joyce dismissed Edes’ concerns about morale, saying that the survey was skewed, and has also said that Edes has no experience running a corrections institution, such as the county jail.

Edes had considered running for election in 2010, but ultimately decided not to run, preferring to put in enough time as a state trooper to get full retirement pay. Even so, the abortive campaign had some fallout. A 33- year veteran sheriff ’s deputy, Gerald Brady, was upset about an alleged assault on a jail inmate. He said he would support Edes in that race in 2010.

He said he had seen a video of what he believed was a criminal assault committed by a county corrections worker. He brought up the assault, but claims he got stonewalled. At some point, he said he would support Edes in the 2010 campaign, because he thought Joyce was covering up the assault.

Brady also had a private polygraph business, and was getting commissions from the state. After the whistleblowing, the sheriff ’s department conducted a criminal investigation on Brady, claiming he was pursuing the side business on county time. Brady said that he was being retaliated against for blowing the whistle on the alleged jail assault; in the end, neither the Cumberland County district attorney nor the Maine Attorney General decided to prosecute Brady. The sheriff ’s office then asked the Maine Criminal Justice Academy to withdraw Brady’s law enforcement certificate.; the Academy declined to do so.

Brady sued the county, Joyce and Chief Deputy Naldo Gagnon in April 2013. The suit alleged the county’s actions were in violation of the Maine Whistleblower Act and Brady’s free speech rights.

Brady was demoted to patrol from detective, and stripped of his position as a county polygraph operator. He said he suffered a mental breakdown after this and was unable to return to work for more than a year. He was subsequently fired because his medical leave extended longer than 12 months. An independent arbitrator ordered his reinstatement as a detective on August 26, 2013, saying the sheriff ’s office took excessive disciplinary action against him.

Joyce declined to comment on the matter, citing pending litigation in the case. Brady also chose not to discuss the situation with The Times Record.

Edes, however, weighed in with his thoughts on how personnel has been handled.

“The sheriff acts on instinct, not facts. I handled a hundred internal affairs cases a year,” Edes said. “It’s important to do the right thing by the employee and the right thing by the department.”

Edes is spending more money than Joyce, in the race, because he says he has to spend it in order to counteract Joyce’s name recognition. But in recent days, a PAC — Citizens for a Safe Cumberland County — operated by a childhood friend of Edes’s, Michael Liberty, has been spending large amounts of money on negative ads against Joyce.

Joyce took the complaint of excessive campaign spending, illegally coordinated by Edes and Liberty, to the Maine Ethics Commission. On Wednesday, however, the commission voted against launching an investigation, saying that Joyce did not provide enough evidence of collusion between Liberty and Edes.

One of the sheriff ’s main arguments in his complaint was that Edes had only recently registered as a Democrat, and the PAC had hired a conservative political firm that had supported Republican candidates in the past.

Edes, for his part, has denounced the attack ads and asked that they be pulled from the airwaves. He said he has not spoken to Liberty since last year, and has had no part in the PAC spending.

Even discounting the PAC money, Edes has outspent Joyce by more than 2-1. The most recent campaign finance disclosures show that Edes has spent $30,000, compared to Joyce’s $14,000.

If the PAC money is taken into account, it would be a state record for spending on a sheriff ’s race in Maine.

Joyce said that he wishes the two had had more time to speak face to face about the issues. “I’m a little frustrated,” he said. “We owe the taxpayers more information. Cumberland County Jail is the biggest mental health hospital in the state of Maine, and that’s an expensive way to handle mental health.”

ghamilton@timesrecord.com