Along Maine’s stunning coastline, vulnerable communities wrestle with the inevitable rise of the sea caused by the warming ocean. Each community has a different strategy to prepare and adapt.

Jailed defendants have a legal right to privately speak with their attorneys. Yet, in Maine, county jails are eavesdropping on these calls. Four jails recorded nearly 1,000 attorney-client calls in a single year and shared recordings with police and prosecutors before trial, a Maine Monitor investigation has found.

Born in the weeks and months after 9/11, and graduated in the year of a crippling pandemic, Maine’s high school seniors have lived through some of the most profound change our country has ever witnessed. These young adults missed out on cornerstone experiences that ease the transition from being a child to being an adult. We captured the stories of a class prematurely dismissed.

Nearly 5,000 babies have been born affected by drugs in Maine in the past five years. Nearly three drug-affected babies were born each day in Maine from 2013-2017, severely taxing hospitals, the foster care system and other resources. These innocent victims are caught in a crisis that is marked by suffering and strained hospitals and state resources. This series of often gut-wrenching stories examines the challenges within this sad reality.

In a remote corner of Maine that locals call ‘The Forgotten County,’ the pandemic triggered isolation, economic struggles and a surge in suicides and overdoses. Hindered by a lack of mental health resources, communities and schools in Washington County banded together to find help for those with anxiety, depression and despair. The Maine Monitor chronicled the heartbreaking losses in a county that seeks solace and solutions to prevent more tragedies.

We examined the criminal justice system at a time when there’s appetite for major change. With a low crime rate and relatively few violent crimes, Maine could become a place for innovation when it comes to the treatment of those with mental illness, substance use disorder or trauma that sometimes leads to crime. Our series looked at the system – successes and failures – to test whether defendants and victims can rely on it to give them due process.

Crime victims are nearly alone in navigating a confusing and understaffed restitution system. District attorneys are as frustrated as crime victims with the fundamental reality of the restitution system in Maine: it’s broken.

Given that Maine is racing into an economic crisis because it doesn’t have enough workers for its jobs, we examined the role immigrants could have in solving Maine’s serious workforce needs. We moved away from the heated rhetoric that focuses on people who are in this country illegally and examined how immigrants who are cleared to work could help fill Maine’s employment gap.

COVID-19 has triggered a grief epidemic. It has robbed families of final goodbyes, left loved ones to die with strangers, postponed wakes and funerals. And it has overwhelmed Maine’s “Last Responders” of priests, chaplains, funeral directors and hospice workers who must work around restrictions aimed at diminishing virus infections. These are stories of The Last Responders. 

Our series, Lottery: Selling Hope to the Hopeless, explores how Mainers falling on hard times rely on the lottery to rescue them. A first-ever statistical analysis of Maine lottery sales and census data by Cornell University, commissioned by us, showed lottery ticket sales rise when people lose their jobs. The state government spent millions to sway Mainers to buy more lottery tickets, we found.

In 2016 and 2017, our team established a database, Making Connections: A Guide to Maine Legislators’ Private and Public Interests, for citizens who wanted to understand how the state legislature works, and to help identify the private financial interests of lawmakers and their families. 

Most of the people who fill prescriptions are honest and do their job well. But some of those people in white smocks are thieves, drug addicts or both, our investigation found. In thirteen cases over the last decade, the public’s health was jeopardized by people with a history of substance abuse and theft were allowed to hold a license to dispense drugs at pharmacies across the state.

Our investigation found scores of problems with how Maine treats its mentally ill residents. After 27 years, Maine still fails to comply with a court-ordered decree to improve treatment of the state’s mentally ill thanks to inadequate funding and potential conflicts of interest.