The state of Maine is not a state most people think of in terms of prison rates and even population. In total the state of Maine has 15 facilities within their corrections system, within these there are 6 state adult correctional facilities, 2 state youth development, 4 adult community correctional region offices, and 3 juvenile community correctional region offices. While these are mostly correctional facilities, there is also one re-entry program for women in Windham that isn’t mentioned on the map of the facilities because it is on the same land as a mixed correctional facility.
The state of Maine doesn’t have ‘county’ jails or correctional facilities, just because of the sheer size of the state and the lacking of a population the further north someone goes. Which makes sense, a majority of the population is further south more of the incarceration will be down there, the only piece that I thought was really interesting is that there is only one facilities with ‘prison’ which is the Maine State Prison in Warren, Maine. In my hometown of Windham, theres two facilities, one we refer to just as the jail and the other as re-entry building, and the Maine State Prison is almost a two hour drive. Just based on previous discussions its not a good financial to transport high risk inmates, so I spent a lot of time questioning what kind of people are incarcerated maybe 5 minutes down the road from my house because of this possible financial restriction. Just a curiosity I had while looking into this.
In terms of the age of the buildings, most of them, if not all, have been around since my parents were young and since I’ve been alive, the only building that is fairly new is the Women’s re-entry facility in Windham, in which that had been build in 2017 and is where all of the programming for local jails are conducted.
Maine DOC Link: https://www.maine.gov/corrections/adultfacilities/index.shtml
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