Maine couldn’t cut its jail population for years. The pandemic did it in 7 weeks.

“In late December, a committee charged with finding ways to reduce the number of unconvicted people held in Maine jails, which had soared since the mid-1990s, published a set of recommendations for the Maine Legislature to review this spring. The report marked at least the fourth time in 15 years that the state had studied the growth of Maine’s jail population without meaningfully reversing the costly trend. Then, in the course of seven weeks, the daily population of Maine’s 15 county jails fell by 40 percent.” Read the full article…