When debtors’ prisons in Maine flouted justice, Pine Tree emerged as a legal ally

"In the summer of 1969, newly minted law school graduate Howard Reben arrived in Portland from upstate New York to start work at Pine Tree Legal Assistance, a 2-year-old nonprofit providing legal aid to poor people, and his new colleagues took him out for drinks to welcome him and give him the lay of the land. When they got to the part about how hundreds of Mainers were imprisoned for not being able to pay minor debts without so much as a hearing, Reben didn’t believe them.

“My reaction was, ‘Oh, this is what Maine lawyers do to a guy from New York, try to kid him into believing they had debtors’ prison,’ ” Reben recalls. “So I called their bluff and said, ‘I am coming back here at 8 a.m., and I want to be taken to see someone who is jailed for debt!’ ”

The next morning the flabbergasted attorney was standing in front of such a prisoner at the Cumberland County Jail, a man who wouldn’t be released until someone paid his debts and ever-growing jail fees. “I found it completely unbelievable,” he recalls..."

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