AUGUSTA — House Rep. Dan Sayre’s bill that aims to take a hard look at the state’s current post-carceral re-entry system took a step forward on Jan. 8.
The Criminal Justice and Public Safety Committee voted 7-2 to advance it to the full legislature. Two Republican representatives, Donald Ardell of Monticello and Robert Nutting of Oakland, voted against the measure.
The bill, which has been significantly amended from its original form, will be discussed by the House and Senate in the coming weeks, according to Sayre – a Democrat who represents Kennebunk.
In its current form, LD 931 would see the Maine Department of Corrections conduct an evaluation of current supports and pinpoint gaps in the re-entry system for Mainers who have been incarcerated. The Department of Corrections would work with community organizers, recovery centers and potential employers in the process. Their findings would be compiled in a report for the Criminal Justice and Public Safety Committee, which would be due on Jan. 1, 2025, according to Sayre.
Ideally that report will inform future legislation on how to support people as they transition from out of prison or jail and back into their communities.
The idea for the legislation came from a conversation Sayre had a year ago with Jean Ginn Marvin, the innkeeper at The Nonantum Resort in Kennebunkport, and her daughter, Colby Marvin Bracy, who is also the human resources director for the Nonantum.
Marvin and Bracy told Sayre that the resort has had success hiring people out of state prison, but they feel those hires “lack a support system to be successful employees.”
“So they asked me to do something,” said Sayre.
According to a 2021 report from the think tank The Brookings Institution, over 50 percent of people who experience incarceration are unable to find steady jobs within the first 12 months of returning to their communities.
It’s a problem that impacts hundreds of people in Maine alone. The United States has the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world, and Maine had 1,714 people behind bars as of Dec. 31, 2020, according to the National Institute of Corrections. That includes people held in seven state prisons and those in the custody of private prisons and local jails.
LD 931 is a product of that conversation, though the original bill, introduced in 2023, looked quite different.
Sayre’s original legislation was more prescriptive, and proposed adopting a number of recommendations put forth by a re-entry focus group. Some of those recommendations included supplying “all jails with sufficient intensive case manager(s)” to support incarcerated people prior to their release, such that the ratio of residents to case managers is 1 to 20; funding for a peer-to-peer mentoring program in every jail across the state; and funding for case managers to help people post-release, specifically through the creation of programs that would supply them with personal hygiene items, Narcan, recovery prevention literature, a cell phone with limited minutes, and fentanyl test strips.
That version also called for the State Workforce Board to develop a plan to expand workforce development programming for formerly incarcerated people, in consultation with the Department of Corrections and the Department of Labor.
However, it became clear that there needed to be more information gathering about the current system in order to assess what is and isn’t working, according to Sayre.
“We’re currently in a situation where we know re-entry is not working as well as it should — employers can see that as well as people who work with the re-entry community. But there’s not enough agreement about what should be done to write a bill that says ‘this is what we should do’,” he explained.
In May 2023, the Department of Corrections presented before the Criminal Justice and Public Safety Committee, saying they were opposed to the measure.
The Department of Corrections is supportive of the bill in its amended form.
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