![]() ![]() “And I really need it to be up and running in a way it really hasn’t been in quite some time.” ![]() ![]() “I need the resource of the Cumberland County Jail,” Sartoris said. The DA explained that summons do not have the same effect as arrests and jail time. “The jail is low, in terms of the number of corrections officers, COVID has been an issue on and off - we again have an outbreak at the Cumberland County Jail.” “The jail has really not been able to accommodate that sort of thing for quite some time,” she said. “It used to be that for a lot of the crimes that the community finds distasteful, but not necessarily high risk - drinking in public, maybe urinating in public - a lot of these sort of quality of life crimes, typically we’d have a quick in - arrest, in, out - very quickly from the jail.” “We were not able to keep people in jail for even a short stint,” Sartoris said. Sartoris explained that there has been “relatively lower enforcement” of crimes for several reasons, including not being able to keep people at the Cumberland County Jail because of COVID outbreaks. “We need to get in there, and we need to do a lot more enforcement,” she said. “Where people are dealing with substance use disorder, it’s really hard to find a place right now where you can say, ‘okay, right now I’m using drugs, eventually I want to be off drugs - where can I go in the interim?'” “I think folks are being burdened in the encampment with a lack of ability to get out on their own terms,” she told Gagnon. Sartoris attributes the encampments to a number of factors, including housing in southern Maine hitting a “crisis point” in terms of affordability. The Cumberland County DA told Gagnon that she recently did an overnight shift with the Portland Police in which almost all of their contacts were “with people who were unhoused.” “The encampments issue for me has been rising in terms of my concerns for a while,” Sartoris said, describing a system of “lawless power structure within the encampments” that put the people that live there at risk. Sartoris told Gagnon that the homeless encampments in Portland are “definitely getting worse.” Cumberland County District Attorney Jackie Sartoris joined Matt Gagnon on Newsradio WGAN Monday morning to discuss Portland’s encampment crisis and the issues her office faces due to a backlog of cases and lack of staffing at the Cumberland County Jail. ![]()
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