I was shocked by last Sunday’s cartoon on the reinstatement of parole which, to me, caricatured incarcerated community members. Presenting fellow human beings as animals is an offensive, stigmatizing trope, used in ugly ways in American history to stoke fear of enslaved people fighting to gain their freedom, of Chinese, Italian and Jewish immigrants at the turn of the last century, of Japanese-Americans during World War II and of African Americans during the Jim Crow era. Why run a cartoon that traffics in this kind of imagery?

To see our incarcerated family members and friends portrayed in this way is painful and wrong. Most residents in Maine’s prisons are people whose lives went off the rails through addiction, poverty, mental illness and trauma and who took plea deals with inadequate legal advice due to our nonexistent public defender system. A cartoon like this heaps unnecessary damage on them.

That does not excuse the damage that incarcerated people may have caused. But to suggest that people who have caused harm are irredeemable animals whose very existence threatens society is to say that people can never change and harms can never be redressed. That is not true.

L.D. 178 represents comprehensive research on parole about what works and what survivors of violent crime need. The bill balances the importance of rehabilitation, taxpayer burden of incarceration ($78,000 per person per year!), safety of victims and the need for a safe, supported pathway to reentry from those who qualify.

Catherine Besteman
Portland