By Thomas Howland, MS, MHRT/C
Picture a prison common room where residents sit at movable furniture, working on college coursework and meeting with staff who know their names and goals. Now picture the same facility five years ago: fixed metal seats, fluorescent lighting and staff whose primary role was containment. Same building. Same walls. Entirely different philosophy.
In 2022, the Maine Department of Corrections (MDOC) made a deliberate break from traditional “care, custody and control.” In its place, MDOC launched the Maine Model of Corrections, a transformative approach centered on rehabilitation, mutual respect, human dignity and community reintegration. The result is one of the most closely watched correctional reforms in the country, spanning state prisons, correctional centers and community supervision. Early results suggest the approach is gaining traction.
Three pillars: Normalization, humanization and destigmatization
The Maine Model rests on three interdependent principles that aim to change not only what corrections does, but how it thinks about the people it serves.
Normalization
Normalization means creating real-world, socially acceptable norms within correctional settings, from physical spaces and daily routines to methods of maintaining order. In practice, this means giving people in custody access to natural light, movable furniture, education, work and meaningful social interaction. Rather than being aspirational, normalization supports the department’s mission by preparing individuals for life beyond the institution and reinforcing the behaviors required for lawful, productive citizenship. In community corrections, normalization shapes supervision through structured interactions, individualized case plans and evidence-based practices that reflect real-world expectations.
Humanization
Humanization reframes accountability not as purely punitive, but as a structured, consistent and proportional response to behavior. When individuals are treated with dignity, they are more likely to perceive the system as fair and engage cooperatively. Within the Maine Model, this means delivering consequences in a way that maintains respect while clearly reinforcing boundaries and supporting skill-building in emotional regulation, problem-solving and pro-social decision-making. In probation, humanization is applied through motivational interviewing, cognitive-behavioral interventions and graduated responses to noncompliance that are both firm and fair.
Destigmatization
Labels that reinforce shame or exclusion directly undermine an individual’s capacity for change. MDOC’s “Language Matters” campaign replaces dehumanizing terminology with person-centered, strength-based language. That is an operational shift, not a symbolic one. Residents and clients who are not burdened by negative labels are more likely to engage in programming, respond to interventions and internalize pro-social identities. For staff, reducing the stigma associated with corrections work supports professionalism, morale and alignment with the department’s rehabilitative mission.
Inside facilities: Case management and physical transformation
Within Maine’s correctional facilities, the Maine Model is carried out through structured case management and intentional facility design. Case management is the backbone of the practice: identifying risk and need, developing Individualized Case Plans (ICPs), and coordinating programming from intake through reentry. ICPs are living documents, developed collaboratively with residents and managed by integrated Unit Teams that include security, program and case management staff.
Physical spaces have been redesigned to support behavioral stability and normalized living: natural light, open sightlines, flexible common areas and views of the surrounding landscape. These are not aesthetic choices. They are evidence-informed design decisions shown to reduce stress, lower incident rates and improve facility climate.
The Maine State Prison created the Earned Living Unit (ELU), a community within a community. Modeled after Norway’s Halden Prison, the ELU is a specialized, incentive-based housing community for residents who demonstrate exemplary behavior. The unit was created in a former special management pod and remodeled by residents. Built on restorative justice principles, the ELU gives residents increased freedom, shared leadership opportunities, more personalized living conditions and specialized privileges within the Maine Model.
Rehabilitative programming includes clinical mental health services; universal access to Medication-Assisted Treatment (MAT) for opioid use disorder, if medically indicated; educational pathways from Adult Basic Education through postsecondary degree attainment; vocational training; faith-based initiatives; and targeted interventions such as sex offender treatment. More than 140 degrees have been awarded through the University of Maine at Augusta Prison Education Partnership. Each program is matched to individual risk profiles and delivered with fidelity to the Principles of Effective Intervention and evidence-based practices.
In the community: Probation and Adult Community Corrections
The Maine Model extends beyond the prison gate. The Division of Adult Community Corrections (ACC), organized across three regional offices statewide, brings the same core principles to probation, parole and post-release supervision. Officers function not only as compliance monitors but also as agents of change, using validated risk assessments, individualized case planning, motivational interviewing and graduated sanctions and incentives to shape behavior over time.
Graduated sanctions provide swift, certain and proportionate responses to noncompliance, while graduated incentives reinforce pro-social behavior such as consistent reporting, employment and treatment engagement. This dual structure reflects correctional research showing that positive reinforcement is often more effective than punishment alone in producing sustained change.
Officers also carry significant investigative responsibilities, including pre-sentence and post-sentence investigations for the courts, furlough assessments, and pardon and commutation investigations for the Governor’s Office. These analytical reports carry real weight in decisions that directly affect liberty and public safety, requiring officers to balance accuracy, objectivity and the humanity of the individual.
A unified philosophy across the continuum
One of the Maine Model’s most significant achievements is creating a coherent, system-wide philosophy that spans incarceration and community supervision. In many jurisdictions, prisons and probation departments operate with distinct, sometimes competing, cultures. Maine deliberately rejects this fragmentation. Shared principles, language and operational expectations guide practice in both settings, ensuring individuals move through corrections as a single, continuous system rather than a series of disconnected phases.
This alignment reduces “reentry shock,” the destabilization that can occur when individuals move between environments with conflicting norms and expectations. A resident who participates in individualized planning, completes evidence-based programming and practices pro-social behaviors during incarceration encounters the same conceptual framework upon entering community supervision. Goals set in custody are carried forward, not discarded.
The impact
Inside facilities, the impact of the model is visible in programming completions. Cognitive-behavioral programs, substance use treatment and domestic violence programming show year-over-year completion growth. The MAT program, universally available across MDOC adult facilities if medically indicated, represents one of the most significant public health interventions in Maine corrections, directly addressing opioid use disorder as a primary driver of recidivism. Meanwhile, the University of Maine at Augusta Prison Education Partnership has awarded more than 140 degrees to incarcerated individuals, and research consistently shows that postsecondary education can reduce reoffending by as much as 43%.
On the workforce side, a corrections environment built on professional purpose rather than adversarial enforcement has shown early signs of improving staff stability, a meaningful finding in a field that has historically struggled with burnout and turnover. Probation completion data also reflect the model’s reach. Successful probation terminations, when clients complete supervision with conditions met, represent one measurable marker of the community corrections side of the Maine Model working as intended.
How Maine compares: A national picture
To understand what Maine is building, it helps to see what it is building against. Across the country, recidivism remains one of corrections’ most persistent challenges. States such as Alaska (61.6%), Arkansas (47.5%) and California (averaging around 50% over the past decade) show how traditional custody-focused models have struggled to break cycles of reoffending. The national three-year reincarceration rate was 35% as recently as 2008 before beginning a gradual decline, driven largely by policy changes in supervision and the growing adoption of evidence-based practices.
A handful of states have pursued rehabilitative reform with varying degrees of system-wide integration. Connecticut and Michigan have invested heavily in risk-needs-responsivity frameworks. Oregon has expanded community-based treatment. What distinguishes Maine is the deliberate unification of philosophy across institutional and community corrections: a single continuum rather than parallel systems that hand individuals off without shared language or expectations.
Maine is pursuing these reforms with a relatively modest correctional budget. The state has the second-lowest incarceration rate in the nation per 100,000 residents. Rather than scaling up prison capacity, MDOC has invested in programming depth, case management infrastructure and community supervision capacity. That resource allocation choice reflects the Maine Model’s underlying premise: well-supported reintegration is more cost-effective, and more humane, than extended incarceration.
What comes next and what other states can learn
The Maine Model is still maturing. The 2022 launch represents a beginning, not a completion, and MDOC leadership is clear-eyed about the work ahead: sustaining cultural change across all staff levels, expanding programming capacity as facility populations grow and continuing to build the data infrastructure needed to track outcomes with precision. The model’s long-term credibility will depend on continued transparency and willingness to learn from what the numbers reveal.
But for other states watching, the core lesson is already clear: system-wide coherence is not a luxury. It is the mechanism. Rehabilitation programs delivered in facilities that do not connect to community supervision practices are incomplete at best. Risk assessment tools applied without humanizing supervision relationships produce compliance without change. The Maine Model demonstrates that the principles of effective intervention reach their full potential only when embedded across the entire correctional continuum, from the first day of incarceration to the last day of probation.
States looking to replicate Maine’s approach should start with three questions: Does the correctional system share a common language from custody to community? Do staff in both settings operate from the same framework? And are investments in rehabilitation matched by the environments created to support it? If the answer to any of those is no, the Maine Model offers a compelling blueprint for where to begin.
Conclusion
The Maine Model of Corrections demonstrates that accountability, human dignity and public safety are not competing values. They are connected. Clear expectations and consistent consequences build responsibility. Dignity keeps individuals invested and capable of growth. Public safety is the outcome when both are backed by evidence-based intervention.
By shifting corrections from a purely custodial function to a coordinated rehabilitative continuum from intake through reentry, Maine is showing what it means to invest in the people who will return to our communities. The goal is not simply fewer people behind bars, but fewer people whose lives and communities are damaged by crime. That is a public safety goal worth building a system around.
Sources
- Maine Department of Corrections (maine.gov/corrections)
- University of Maine at Augusta Prison Education Partnership
- Bureau of Justice Assistance
- Council of State Governments Justice Center, “50 States, 1 Goal” (2024)
- Bureau of Justice Statistics, Recidivism and Reentry
About the author
Thomas Howland has been a Correctional Care and Treatment Worker at the Maine State Prison for the past 10 years. Before joining the prison, he was a corrections officer at the Knox County Jail in Rockland, Maine, for eight years. He received a bachelor’s degree in Administration of Justice from the University of Maine at Augusta in 2009 and a master’s degree in Justice Studies. Since 2019, he has been an adjunct instructor in the Justice Studies program at the University of Maine at Augusta.