The excitement was palpable Monday morning as eight teenagers strapped on life jackets and helmets and prepared for a whitewater rafting trip down the Kennebec River.
The trip gave the teens — who are all incarcerated at Long Creek Youth Development Center, Maine’s only youth prison — a chance to connect with nature and work together. It was a culmination of smaller trips, such as day hikes, that took place with a relatively new program in the state throughout the summer.
The program, called Pathfinders, works with incarcerated youth and adults in Maine and Washington state. The people in the programs are “committed to positively redirecting their lives,” said Christopher Poulos, executive director of Center for Justice and Human Dignity. The teenagers who participated in the rafting trip are nearing the end of their sentences.
Pathfinders is helping rehabilitate youth and prepare them to re-enter society at a time when the Legislature is deciding what to do with Long Creek. A bill to close the facility was vetoed by Gov. Janet Mills in 2021, and a two-year study to consider alternatives to the prison began this year
The kids from Long Creek rafted alongside Maine Department of Corrections Commissioner Randall Liberty, occasionally joking with the commissioner as the boats passed each other. Also on the trip were Stian Estenstad and Kim Ekhaugen, two Norwegian men who run a similar program.
The Bangor Daily News is not naming or showing the teenagers because they are juveniles. The Maine Department of Corrections also requested the teens not be identified for privacy reasons.
The Maine teenagers were frequently laughing as they crashed through waves during the 12-mile trip. They also got to swim parts of the river, playing as they did flips off the rafts and floated with the current.
Pathfinders is a non-adversarial approach to incarceration and can be part of what Long Creek may look like after the alternatives study is complete, Liberty said.
“It’s fellowship,” Liberty said. “It’s humans enjoying nature and just having joy and a normal environment. For many of these youth, they haven’t experienced that. They had to grow up too quickly and they had very difficult childhoods or environments. We find that anything we can do to normalize that experience we get great outcomes.”
Working with youth specifically is important because keeping them out of the criminal justice system benefits everyone, Liberty said.
Poulos was born and raised in Maine. He spent more than two years in prison after he was convicted of federal drug offenses, then later graduated law school and was admitted to the Maine Bar — a rarity for people with felony convictions.
The teamwork and communication between staff and youth help change how they interact back at the facility. There is a fundamental difference in their interactions because of the positive experiences, Poulos said. Pathfinders and the Maine Department of Corrections are working on finding a way to quantify and track the changes.
“Once people do a hike together, share a meal together, it breaks down the us versus them dynamics that are often found in correctional environments,” Poulos said. “I don’t know if it’s cheesy or not, but it really does give the participants hope for their future.”
When the program started in early 2025, it was about getting people out in nature and providing opportunities, Poulos said. As trips continued, an unexpected side effect emerged: the corrections officers on trips tended to be happier at work.
Staff on the trips get to teach participants life skills, like building a campfire, which builds morale, Poulos said. It allows them to do more than just tell people, “Don’t do that,” over and over, he said.
To qualify for the program, kids have to be in the last few months of their sentences and adults in the last couple of years. They must be at the minimum security level and be selected after an application process.
“Everyone that participates has everything to lose by doing something wrong and nothing at all to gain,” Poulos said.
Pathfinders is inspired in part by a program in Norway that has taken incarcerated people out on multi-day Viking sailing ship expeditions for more than two decades, Estenstad said. No one has ever tried to escape on the Norway trips.
“If you treat people in a prison more humane … we’ve seen it in Norway, you can see it here, the violence against staff and against other prisoners [is] reduced,” Estenstad said. “Also the re-entry process is more easy, actually.”
The trips include smaller everyday moments too, like a stop at a gas station or grocery store. It may have been years since participants, especially the adults, have been in society, Poulos said. This gives people a change to adjust before they’re just dumped out into the community.
When people participate in the normalized environments while still incarcerated, there is a lower rate of people who return to the criminal justice system, Liberty said.
“They will all be someone’s neighbor one day,” Ekhaugen said, “So who would you like to have as your neighbor after release? Someone who has been locked in for years or months? Or do you want to have a neighbor that [has experienced] normality while… inside [prison] and are motivated to change?”