Attorney calls recorded by Maine jails

January 26, 2022

Maine jails recorded nearly 1,000 calls from inmates to their attorneys at the Aroostook, Androscoggin, Franklin and Kennebec county jails.

Maine jails recorded nearly 1,000 calls from inmates to their attorneys at the Aroostook, Androscoggin, Franklin and Kennebec county jails. The Maine Monitor filed public records requests to obtain the records, which span June 2019 to May 2020.

Public records requests were denied by eight other counties. The Maine Monitor is pursuing a lawsuit to obtain data on jail phone recordings from York County.

Read the investigation here.

Search by county, defendant or attorney.

*Database does not include 52 calls to attorneys originating from the Aroostook County Jail in which the defendants’ names were blank. Data for calls recorded by the Kennebec County Jail cover January 2019 to May 2020.

Source: Maine county jail records, The Maine Monitor analysis

Samantha Hogan

Samantha Hogan focuses on government accountability projects for The Maine Monitor. She joined the newsroom as its first full-time reporter in 2019 with Report for America. Samantha was named the 2021 Maine’s Journalist of the Year by the Maine Press Association, and spent 2020 reporting on Maine’s court system through the ProPublica Local Reporting Network. Her reporting on county jails recording and listening to attorney-client phone calls won the Silver Gavel award from the American Bar Association and was also a semi-finalist for the Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting in 2023. Samantha previously worked for The Frederick News-Post and interned twice for The Washington Post.