To our readers, Evangelos pushes to restore parole to Maine’s justice system By Douglas Rooks | Apr 20, 2021 Rep. Jeffrey Evangelos [Editor’s note: this column was originally published in The Maine Monitor.] If you are sentenced to a long prison term in Maine, your chances of being released early are almost nil. In 1976, Maine became the first state to abolish parole entirely, also doing away with the Executive Council, which once shared authority for pardons with the governor. Since then, sentence commutations, another form of early release, have been rare, perhaps non-existent. Rep. Je...