The New York Times today published a second story in a series on Maine's juvenile justice system, this one expressly calling attention to differences in rural and urban: "For Young Offenders in Maine, Justice Varies by Geography." Journalist Callie Ferguson reports as part of a year-long investigation into the system, as part of the Times Local Investigations Fellowship. Here's an excerpt leading with the nature of Aroostook County, the legendary county in the state's far north:
Aroostook County, in Maine’s far north, is the largest county east of the Mississippi, a sparsely populated region of fields and forests with just two small cities and about 50 smaller towns. Police chiefs describe their jurisdictions as sleepy, with little serious crime.
Even so, the county has sent a disproportionate number of adolescents in recent years to the state’s only youth prison.
The data show that Aroostook sent 20 youth to that juvenile prison between 2017 and 2023, and that's twice the number sent by York County, in the Southern part of the state, which has three times as many residents. Ferguson describes York County as including "wealthy coastal communities and former mill towns that help make up Maine's largest metropolitan areas." There, harsh sentences like the ones doled out by Aroostook County are rarely imposed. Indeed, the story notes that Maine has, in recent years, emphasized rehabilitation in its approach to juvenile offenders, consistent with national trends. And that's where differences show up between rural and urban.
Aroostook was also an outlier for using short prison terms, known as “shock” sentences, to punish young offenders, handing them down at some of the highest rates statewide before the practice began to wane.
But the differences between Aroostook and York Counties show that the effort has played out unevenly, resulting in justice by geography. The disparity appears to stem from philosophical differences over the appropriate response to teenagers who get in trouble, the varying availability of services across the state and the unequal distribution of lawyers and caseloads, according to interviews with defense attorneys, law enforcement officials and former corrections officials.
York stood out even beyond its low commitment rate. Adolescents there were far less likely to end up with a felony record than anywhere except for neighboring Cumberland County, according to a data analysis by The New York Times and The Bangor Daily News. Between 2017 and 2022, those counties reduced 93 percent of felony cases that resulted in a guilty plea to misdemeanors. At the low end, two central Maine counties reduced them only about half the time; in Aroostook, that rate was 64 percent.
Ferguson quotes Sarah Branch, a former juvenile prosecutor who knows directs the Youth Justice Clinic at the University of Maine School of Law:
Justice should not be defined by where in the state a child lives. What we have right now are barriers for some children that don’t exist for others.
Justice by geography isn’t unique to Maine. Across the United States, the idiosyncrasies of local courts affect case outcomes, and variation is especially likely in the juvenile system with its emphasis on individualized treatment. Last year, a nonprofit advocacy group in Massachusetts identified wide-ranging differences depending on which police department, district attorney and court handled a case. Similarly, a 2005 study of Missouri’s juvenile system found that teenagers’ odds of confinement changed with where they lived.
One issue is the lack of staffing, expertise, and resources in rural counties, which may see only a dozen juvenile cases a year. One aspect of that shortage is so-called legal deserts: too few attorneys.
And while there are not nearly enough lawyers to represent poor defendants in Maine, the problem is acute in rural areas. Last year, the state created a special team of public defenders to combat the shortage in Aroostook, Penobscot and Washington Counties.
An earlier installment in this Maine juvenile justice series is here. You can read more about Aroostook County and York County, Maine in these prior posts on a wide range of topics, including the rural lawyer shortage in that state and Senator Susan Collins, who hails from Aroostook County. Here are some photos of a jail in Wiscasset, Maine (also coastal, towards the south of the state), in a post discussing the rural incarceration boom. And here are some other photos of southern Maine. Aroostook County features in Elizabeth Strout's novel Oh William!, as summarized here.
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