50 years after ending parole, Maine might bring it back

By Marie Weidmayer, Bangor Daily News Staff

Maine is considering bringing parole back — 50 years after the state ended the program.

Dozens of people testified in support of reestablishing parole during an hours-long public hearing Jan. 8 before the Maine Legislature Judiciary Committee. The bill was proposed during last year’s legislative session.

In the decades since Maine got rid of parole in 1976, the prison population has tripled. Reestablishing parole aims to reduce the number of people incarcerated while lowering the cost to taxpayers, experts said.

The state is one of 16 that does not have a parole system. 

The proposed bill stems from a statewide Commission to Examine Reestablishing Parole, which recommended bringing the program back. The 14-page bill proposed by Rep. Nina Milliken, D-Blue Hill, outlines how the program would be run and who would be eligible.

“Parole does not guarantee release, it guarantees review,” Milliken said during her testimony.

It gives people accountability and purpose, which means they can work toward changing and living responsibly, said Tracy Meggison, who is incarcerated.

No one is eligible for parole until at least five years after the legislation becomes law, the bill said.

An incarcerated person who has served half of their sentence, and has completed specific programs designed to help them, is eligible to go before the parole board, the bill said. If someone is sentenced to life, they must serve at least 20 years before being eligible.

That board will have specific guidelines to determine if people are eligible for supervised release.

Housing a person in prison costs about $116,000 a year, multiple people said during the hearing. As the prison population ages, the cost for medical care grows, Milliken said.

“All of this comes at an enormous cost to the Maine taxpayer,” she said.

A total of 93 written testimonies were submitted, some of which overlapped with spoken testimony. Roughly 35 people who are in Maine prisons submitted testimony, outlining how they said it would help them.

“Parole is not about avoiding accountability,” Earl Bieler said, who is incarcerated. “It is about recognizing growth when it actually happens. Parole matters for people like me. Not because we were forced to change, and not because someone made us. It matters because we chose to. Because we wanted to take responsibility, live differently, and become better human beings.”

Retroactive parole for people who have already been sentenced would revictimize people, Rep. Sue Salisbury, D-Westbrook said. She supports reestablishing parole, but only for people who are sentenced in the future.

The Maine Coalition to End Domestic Violence has worked with Milliken to make some changes to the bill, but it still opposes the bill, according to written testimony submitted by Andrea Mancuso, public policy director for the coalition. The organization is not opposed to parole but it must be paired with processes to address community safety and there is no commitment for that from the state.

“Thoughtful and comprehensive modifications,” with adequate time are needed if parole moves forward, she said. 

There is also a need for more re-entry services and community care if parole is reestablished, something the bill does not address, Mancuso said.

“The costs of repairing what is broken by trauma are much higher than the costs of raising whole human beings,” Mancuso said. “Yet, the Maine Legislature has been unwilling to appropriate sufficient funds to support critically needed community-based services across the board despite broad consensus that those services are crumbling.”

The Maine Department of Corrections opposes reestablishing parole because it is unnecessary, Deputy Commissioner Anthony Cantillo said. He pointed to the good time program, which allows early release for good behavior, and the supervised community confinement program.

The parole program would be “complicated and expensive,” Cantillo said. Hearings before the board would be held within 60 days of the request and require the department to provide full records within 30 days, which provides “little time” to redact victim information, he said.

There were 107 people in the community confinement program last year, Cantillo said. People are permitted to spend the last 30 months of their sentence in the program, and in 2025, 91% of women were successful and 82% of men were, he said.

A work session for the bill is not yet scheduled.