A newly renovated and upgraded Maine Correctional Center in Windham was unveiled Wednesday.

Maine Department of Corrections Commissioner Randall Liberty said the center’s capacity is 720 men and women, and is designed with an emphasis on education, treatment and rehabilitation.

The new Maine Correctional Center in Windham is a modern, clean contrast to the original center, which was built in 1919, and represents a modern-day approach to corrections.

Liberty and other officials, including Gov. Janet Mills, were on hand Wednesday at a ceremony making the center’s opening official.

Mills praised the center’s vocational program, which offers job training for inmates.

“Because they will re-enter society, we need to help prepare them for that,” she said.

Liberty described the previous facility’s environment as “very Shawshank-like,” with problems ranging from electricity to plumbing to heating systems.

The new center has a slightly larger capacity than the older facility, but Liberty said the new center’s design wasn’t about adding more cells.

“It was about upgrading the quality of the environment,” he said.

Anna Black, a department spokesperson, noted that officials had wanted the original facility replaced for some time.

“It was really dilapidated, and it needed to be improved,” she said.

The revamped center is a medium security state prison, Black said, housing inmates serving sentences longer than nine months, as opposed to county jails, where inmates have shorter stays.

The new center has been more than a decade in the making, surviving budget cuts, more than one gubernatorial administration and a global pandemic.

The project involved razing and replacing the existing facility. When work began in 2018, the project had a $150 million budget, which swelled to $225 million before being pared down to just over $142 million by the time the bulk of the new center’s construction was completed over the past two months, Liberty said.

Liberty said the new center boasts enhanced programs for vocational training and treatment for mental illness and substance use disorders. Such programs, he said, are reducing the likelihood of repeat offenders coming back into the system.

Treatment includes medically-assisted addiction treatment, a program that incorporates traditional counseling and prescription drugs such as buprenorphine and naltrexone. The department began adding the program to state facilities with pilot programs in 2019.

The department contracts with Wellpath, a mental and behavioral health services provider, for mental illness treatment. Inmates will have access to their services for treating mental illnesses and disorders.

Statewide, such an approach to corrections may be working. A department report covering a three-year period, from 2019 through 2022, showed just under 6% of inmates returning to custody within one year of release. 

Liberty also noted overdose deaths among the formerly incarcerated have gone down 60% statewide since treatment programs began at state correctional facilities.

“If you want to invest in saving lives and answer your constituents’ demands to do something about overdose deaths, that’s one very specific area where we’ve been successful in providing that treatment,” he said. 

Another report indicated that the number of inmates statewide that are using the medically-assisted addiction treatment program went from 82 in the second half of 2019 to 670 in the second half of 2022.

Statistics showing trends relating to mental illness were not available.

In Windham, Liberty noted that in 2017, just before the new construction began, the center recorded 87 assaults by inmates on staff. Last year, he said, there were only seven, and he credited a less adversarial and more constructive relationship between residents and staff with the lower figure.

Liberty said the center’s capacity is 720 men and women, and as of Wednesday there were 305 male and 88 female residents. Added to the capacity of the state’s other prisons, the total capacity is now 2,606. According to the department’s data covering the period of April 2022 to April 2023, there were an average of 1,678 inmates.

Tony Cantillo, deputy commissioner, said he was a warden at the original facility. The new center, he said, has more open space, which makes it easier to monitor the residents. Other considerations for staff, such as break rooms, he said, are significant improvements.

But like Liberty, Cantillo said the addition and expansion of programs such as job training and substance use disorder treatment stand out as examples of what modern corrections mandates.

“There’s a lot of big emphasis on recreation, vocational and educational services,” he said.

Among programs at the center is a garden that will grow as much as 35,000 pounds of produce. That will contribute to an estimated 200,000 pounds produced by similar gardens at other state facilities statewide, for use in the kitchens at all state correctional facilities, including Windham.

“It gives the residents a sense of self-worth and accomplishment to nurture and grow something, just like it does us,” he said.