3 min read

Shannon Meade is a career public defender who lives and works in Washington
County. He writes solely in his personal capacity and the views expressed are his own.

I have spent my career as a public defender. Along the way, I have lived and practiced
law in Chicago, Orlando, Los Angeles and now Washington County, Maine. Those places have given me very different views of the country. The work has also introduced me to people from almost every walk of life, often during one of the worst periods of their lives.

In a criminal courtroom, government is not hard to find. There is a police report, a prosecutor, a judge and the power to take away liberty. What’s most striking is how often other forms of government, the kinds of help that could have averted a crisis, were harder to find earlier.

A charging document necessarily begins with a date, but that date tells us when the alleged crime occurred, not when the trouble surrounding it began.

In Washington County, the trouble often starts with something as ordinary as distance. A treatment program or medical appointment two counties away is of little use to someone
without a car, gas money or a dependable ride. A job cannot stabilize a family when there is nowhere affordable to live. A service may appear available on paper, but, is unavailable in practice.

Large cities have shortages and institutional failures of their own. Proximity does not
guarantee access. In rural Maine, however, almost every shortage comes with miles
attached.

That is why I paid attention to Hannah Pingree.

Pingree was raised in a rural island community on North Haven. That fact alone does
not qualify anyone to be governor. Her experience since then is more persuasive. She
served eight years in the Legislature and became speaker of the House. She also ran a small business and a local housing organization, chaired her local school board and directed the Governor’s Office of Policy Innovation and the Future. She has seen public decisions from several sides, including the side where somebody must make them work.

Her proposals reflect that experience. Her healthcare plan addresses rural provider
shortages, mental health and substance use care, mobile crisis teams, crisis receiving
centers and recovery support. Her housing plan recognizes that different regions need
different approaches while addressing housing production, preservation, eviction
prevention and homelessness.

From my side of the courtroom, I do not regard those as subjects separate from public
safety. Stable housing makes it more possible to keep a job, attend treatment, comply with
court requirements and rebuild a life. If a mobile crisis worker can reach a person
before a crisis becomes a police call, that matters to the person, the family, the officer
and the community.

None of this will eliminate crime. That is not a reasonable measure of any policy. The
question is whether fewer people will reach the criminal courts with problems that could
have been addressed earlier, and at far less human cost.

I make my living testing the state’s assertions, so I do not treat a detailed campaign plan as an accomplishment. It is still a promise. What a plan can show is what a candidate sees. Pingree sees that a statewide service is not truly statewide unless people can use it where they live.

Most days, my work begins after a police report has been written. Maine’s next governor
must take the less visible work before that point just as seriously, including whether
people remain housed and whether care actually reaches them.

Public programs cannot stop functioning at the edge of the communities where services are concentrated. From my place at the defense table in Washington County, Hannah Pingree is the candidate I trust to do that work.