Daily Archives: June 3, 2022

Jarrod ShanahanCaptives: How Rikers Island Took New York City Hostage (Verso Books, 2022)

When Johnny Cash performed for the inmates of San Quentin prison in 1969, he wrote a song especially for the occasion. The first several verses ask why the prison exists and what good it could possibly do for those imprisoned there or society as a whole. Its last verse concludes, to a roar of applause:

At the time, the song was considered nave pandering. This was still the era in which liberal academics and politicians believed in penal welfarism, that Americas carceral institutions could be transformed into something better than the torturous dungeons described by Cash. A notable example was the planned expansion of New Yorks Rikers Island from a small penal work camp to a state-of-the-art facility of human rehabilitation. Jarrod Shanahans Captives, the first history of Rikers written in what may be its final years, explains why the project failed, why renewed progressive efforts to replace facilities like Rikers today will fail again, and why Cash was probably right.

The book opens with an inmate uprising at New York Citys House of Detention for Women (HDW) in 1954one of many riots described with the visceral detail with which Bill Buford depicted soccer-hooligan street brawls in Among the Thugs. The facility-wide chants and miniature arsons alerted Greenwich Village passers-by, and eventually the sympathetic ears of the media, and then-recently-appointed Department of Corrections (DOC) commissioner Anna M. Kross. To her, the conspicuously dangerous and unsanitary conditions of HDW were emblematic of the citys eighteenth-century system of jails she had been tasked to modernize. Declaring that the old jails could not be reformed, Kross announced that a new central jail, designed by humanitarian academics and run by psychologists and social workers, would replace them on Rikers Island. Arriving inmates would be evaluated, categorized, directed to the right sort of expert, and assigned to a program based on whatever type of help they need to leave the facility as a productive member of society. It would be a model for the future of jails that would look more like social emergency rooms than warehouses for surplus population. Once completed, she believed, Rikers would be the pride of New York City.

An early sign of trouble for Krosss plan came a decade later. With a new womens prison under construction on Rikers, HDW was once again rocked by scandal. Peace activist Andrea Dworkin published an expos of the horrors of daily life inside HDW, apparently unabated since the 1954 riot. This time Krosss DOC was less sympathetic, and new voices spoke up to defend her work: the various religious, student, and activist nonprofits and NGOs that Kross had introduced to the facility as part of her plan to wrestle control of the jails away from the cruel and apathetic correction officers. Instead of taking a strong stand against brutality, the religious leaders and representatives of the Womens Prison Association and the Society for Ethical Culture claimed Dworkin was exaggerating or lying.

Despite the important advocacy work these groups often provide for inmates, Shanahan observes, these nonprofits operate at the pleasure of the facilitys administration, and are thus unwilling to challenge effectively the day-to-day cruel and unusual excess of incarceration. Ultimately, he writes, these nonprofits have no choice but to facilitate the perpetuation and expansion of carceral institutions, lending them ideological cover and practical support under the auspices of doing good deeds.

At their highest levels, Shanahan argues, the corporate-funded prison-reform NGOs like the Ford Foundation and Vera Institute for Justice hope to reshape prisons so they can be effective institutions of social engineering: criminals would be transformed into compliant workers for industries experiencing shortages.

But even as their influence within the penal bureaucracy increased, the visions the NGOs shared with Kross were blocked by the paramilitary power of the true authority in city jails: the guards. Bolstered by a new grassroots right-wing movement called Support Your Local Police (SYLP), the guards reimagined themselves as soldiers on the front line of a war against urban riots, street gangs, crime, drug addiction, and revolutionary struggle. Trials for police or guard brutality were met by SYLP activists and swarms of off-duty cops and guards in impressive and often violent shows of solidarity. Eventually police and guard unions merged into a separate Uniformed Forces Coalition, a far-right labor-bargaining group of NYPD, FDNY, housing police, and prison guardswho were often conspicuously armedthat negotiated separately from other city employees.

A final nail in the coffin of the penal welfarist dream came with the fiscal crisis of the seventies. Years before New York City faced bankruptcy, inmates were the first to suffer punishing cuts in wages, services, work programs, food, and basic hygiene. Shells of their original blueprints, the new Brutalist Rikers cellblocks were packed with an increasing number of bunks to keep up with skyrocketing arrests throughout the crumbling city. By the mid-seventies, politicians like Ed Koch ran TV ads showing empty jail beds he promised to fill once in office. In just a few years time, it appeared that it was Kross, not Cash, who was nave.

Victorious against plans to replace them with social workers, the guards treated the expanded Rikers like their island fortress. Subsequent attempts by the DOC or judges to rein in their power with oversight or humanitarian reforms were met with increasingly daring wildcat strikes. Shanahan describes the most dramatic of these actions, the 1990 seizure of the bridge to Rikers by dozens of correction officers, drunk and determined to brutalize anyone who tried to cross, even paramedics. The blockade starved inmates to the point of another desperate riot, which was in turn quickly put down by indiscriminate beatings.

Contradicting a position commonly taken by prison abolitionists, Shanahan argues that cops and guards are indeed workers, but workers with a uniquely reactionary worldview resulting from their profession, in which human lives are treated as raw material. As was often the case with such protests, the central demand of the bridge blockade was the end of any oversight of how and when they meted out violence. The zealotry that terrified New Deal-era bureaucrats like Kross was now a perfect fit for the disciplinary neoliberal economic restructuring of the seventies and eighties. Outcasts of the production process could be treated as antisocial elements driving urban decay instead of the actual culprits, the finance, insurance, and real estate (FIRE) tycoons pushing slash-and-burn austerity.

Shanahan, a former inmate at Rikers, seems to delight in interrupting his account of the gruesome dealings among the city, guards, and judges with gripping tales of prisoner escapes and uprisings. In one, a man with a broken leg leaves his cast behind as a decoy to make it appear as if he is still in bed. In another, the Puerto Rican revolutionary William Morales, his hands and vision destroyed by a faulty explosive, tumbles from a Bellevue Hospital window into the arms of his comrades, who evacuate him to Cuba, where he lives to this day. The uprisings, on the other hand, do not produce such happy results. And yet, every dozen pages or so, they keep happeninga chilling testament to how intolerable daily conditions must be.

Keeping the work historical, there is only a brief mention of the movement against Rikers today. The #CLOSErikers coalition formed in 2016 when the stories of Kalief Browderwho committed suicide at age twenty-two after spending two years in solitary confinement for allegedly stealing a backpackand later, Layleen Polancoa transgender woman who died of a seizure in solitary in 2019renewed condemnation of Rikerss reliance on torture. With Ford Foundation funds, the coalition successfully pushed a plan through city government that would relocate Rikerss inmates to four new community jailsdescribed with all the optimism with which Kross had imagined Rikers.

But a sizable part of that coalition were abolitionists. Calling themselves No New Jails NYC, they broke against the plan with a counterproposal: that the eleven billion dollars for new facilities should be spent instead on social programs that would reduce the underlying causes of crime. They agreed that Rikers should be closed, but insisted that it should be replaced with nothing. Following the Movement for Black Lives, the position that jails simply dont work was approaching grassroots consensus among the progressive left. Nonetheless, it was called nave, even inhumane, by the NGO advocates of the new jails, even those who had adapted the newly popular language of abolition.

The struggle to control Rikers, Shanahan writes, is a struggle for the city itself. If thats the case, it would seem the city is run by a fluid alliance of these NGO leaders, city bureaucrats, police officers, and corporate overlords, bound together, despite their occasionally competing interests, by a belief that prisons should continue in perpetuity. While he does not go so far as to offer an abolitionist program in Captives, his history of Rikers convincingly demonstrates that there is no other logical alternative to the horrors of prisons and jails than to break with the social order they represent.

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Rikers, what good do you think you do? The Brooklyn Rail - Brooklyn Rail

Zulkiflee Sebli

KUCHING (June 3): Many teachers prefer national examinations to school-based assessment, said Sarawak Bumiputera Teachers Union (KGBS) president Zulkiflee Sebli.

According to him, students are more focused when there are examinations compared to school-based assessment because they place more importance on examinations.

In addition, school-based assessment will add on to the work burden of the teachers, he said today when commenting on the abolition of the Form 3 Assessment (PT3) starting this year.

Yesterday Senior Minister Datuk Dr Mohd Radzi Mohd Jidin said the Education Ministry, in abolishing the PT3, will introduce more school- and class-based evaluation to replace the formal testing, where students between Primary 4 and Form 3 would be assessed on a yearly basis.

Zulkiflee said other than an increase in workload, there is no other issue for teachers as they have already been exposed to classroom assessment (PBD) prior to the abolition of PT3.

State Education Department (JPN) and District Education Office (PPD) always request reports and data from the school. Teachers have deadlines to meet to complete PBD reports despite their daily busy schedule, he said.

Zulkiflee added there is no problem in completing the Form 3 syllabus within the stipulated timeframe as teachers are very committed to their work.

Teachers can use various methods to complete the syllabus. There may even be a small number of teachers who have to use time outside of the official learning and facilitating process (PdPc) to complete the syllabus but we are confident they can and are ready to do so, he said.

Zulkiflee added many primary school teachers hope that the Ujian Pencapaian Sekolah Rendah (UPSR) would be re-established so that pupils will be more focused on their learning.

With UPSR, pupils will have a target when they attend school. In the past, the first thing they thought of when entering Primary 6 was UPSR and getting good results to continue further.

UPSR facilitated the placement of students into secondary schools, he said.

The UPSR was abolished last year.

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Private colleges in California want more power to rein in trespassing on their campuses, particularly when people repeatedly enter to harass students.

Willful trespassing on the campuses of Californias K-12 schools and public universities is considered a misdemeanor, and can result in jail time. But private colleges can only hand out warning letters.

The issue is at the center of a bill that is one chamber away from reaching Gov. Gavin Newsoms desk. Private colleges say that the current policy hampers their ability to protect students but some students worry that the proposed changes could make campuses feel cut off from surrounding neighborhoods and lead to racial profiling.

The no-trespassing letters are ineffective because there isnt a clear consequence for violating them, say the bills supporters, which include policing associations and the 86-member Association of Independent California Colleges and Universities.

During the pandemic, the association has heard instances of people entering campuses to make racist comments toward Asian American and Pacific Islander students. The association has also heard of people coming on campuses to sexually harass female students, said Alex Graves, the associations vice president for government relations.

Still, the bill highlights a complicated dynamic.

Many private college campuses in California are open spaces, including the Claremont Colleges and Santa Clara University, which support the bill. Community members pass through often to walk their dogs or relax on the manicured lawns.

The open nature of campuses makes reining in trespassing a very difficult line to walk, said Jessica Ramey Stender, policy director and deputy legal director of Equal Rights Advocates, a gender-justice nonprofit.

I think it shows the difficult position that universities are in, in trying to ensure that they keep their students safe, she said.

Heres what you should know about Senate Bill 748.

The bill would rework a section of the states criminal code that right now only applies to public colleges or universities and public and private K-12 schools.

For those schools, the law says that its a misdemeanor for a person to willfully and knowingly enter a campus after having been banned. A person can be barred for disrupting a campus or facilitys orderly operation, according to the law.

John Ojeisekhoba, president-elect of campus-policing association

The bill would expand the provision to include private colleges and universities. Punishment for a violation is either a fine of no more than $500 or imprisonment in county jail for no longer than six months, or both.

Authored by Sen. Anthony Portantino, a San Fernando Valley Democrat, the bill passed the state Senate 34-0 in January and is scheduled to be heard by the Assembly Public Safety Committee on Wednesday.

Lets use the University of San Diego as an example.

The university supports the bill. And, it has the kind of idyllic campus that the general public regularly visits: 180 acres overlooking San Diego, Mission Bay, and the Pacific Ocean.

Its fairly common for the universitys police force to be summoned to disturbances involving people who have entered campus, said James Miyashiro, assistant vice president of safety.

A recent example involved a homeless man. He had barricaded himself in a campus bathroom, wouldnt come out, and threatened to return again after police told him to leave, said Miyashiro, who watched footage from an officers body camera.

Altercations with students also occur. People come to campus to play sports and get in fights with students who have the space reserved. Or, people will make comments that offend students, who then report them to the police, Miyashiro said.

When campus police get such a report, they will ask the person to leave campus. If they continue to come back, officers will give them a letter barring them from campus.

But that doesnt have a lot of teeth behind it, Miyashiro said. And, city police are reluctant to respond to trespassing issues on campus, particularly during hours when the buildings are open, he said.

Miyashiro contrasted the dynamic with his experience at two public universities where he previously worked: the University of California, Los Angeles and Riverside Community College District. There, campus police could tell a person causing a disturbance that if they returned within seven days, they could be arrested.

Several city police associations back the bill, including the Riverside Sheriffs Association and the Santa Ana Police Officers Association.

Equal Rights Advocates also decided to support the measure, Stender said, based on what it has heard from students who are victims of sexual assault or harassment. Sometimes, the attacker will return to campus to continue harassing or even assault them again, she said.

The consequence of a misdemeanor charge brings clarity, said John Ojeisekhoba, the president-elect of a campus-policing association that supports the bill.

It will give an officer a significant level of deterrence. That will be the difference. Right now, theres just no such thing, he said.

Several students said they are concerned about this outcome.

Alessia Milstein, who graduated this spring from Pitzer College, said there should be other options for how people get help instead of defaulting to calling the police. Milstein was involved in the Claremont Colleges Prison Abolition Collective, a club that educates students about prison and police abolition.

Alessia Milstein graduated this spring from Pitzer College, in Claremont. She was involved in abolition activism on campus. May 25, 2022.

(Raquel Natalicchio

/

CalMatters)

Its also important to remember that everyone is subject to having racial biases and relying on police to decide who belongs on campus is allowing those to run freely, she said.

I just feel like its kind of the epitome, again, of why police dont work, Milstein said. Youre trying to solve every conflict with a catchall that is rooted in colonialism and white supremacy.

There are more negatives than positives with the bill, said Tess Gibbs, a rising senior at Scripps College, who is also part of the collective.

Specifically, Gibbs said she worries the bill could make campus into a sort of fortress, cut off from the surrounding community.

I just question how much this would actually significantly increase safety of students, which seems to be its intention, Gibbs said.

A movement to reduce police presence on California campuses has grown over the last several years, following a nationwide reckoning over the scope of police power.

At the University of California and California State University, some students have called for abolishing or increasing oversight of campus police departments, particularly because of concerns over aggressive policing of protests and racial profiling.

And, racism regularly leads to people of color being deemed suspicious. One such incident that garnered national attention: In 2018, a white student at Yale University called campus police after seeing a black student asleep in the dorm common room. Several police officers responded to the incident.

We have to make sure its applied in a way that makes sense, Portantino said of the bill.

When asked via email about concerns that the bill could lead to racial profiling or harassment of homeless people, he said that the measure isnt meant to be used for anything other than fostering prudent student and campus safety.

Several campus safety officials interviewed said they intended to use the bills power just as needed, rather than overdo it. Of course, thats easier said than done.

Ojeisekhoba, of the International Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators, acknowledged that mistakes can happen. Still, he said he has seen a shift in how campus police respond to reports of suspicious behavior. As an example, he pointed to the private university where he is chief of police, Biola University in La Mirada.

Instead of immediately sending an officer to the scene after getting a call about suspicious behavior, dispatchers are trained to ask more questions in the hopes of figuring out if there is actually an issue. The approach is meant to reduce potential mistakes or the appearance of racial profiling, he said.

Tess Gibbs, a Scripps College student

Stan Skipworth, associate vice president of campus safety at the Claremont Colleges, also said in an email that jail time isnt necessary in all instances of trespassing just the most egregious cases.

Instead of relying on police, students should learn to count on community members when problems arise, said Alaia Zaki, a rising senior at the University of San Francisco. Zaki is part of the universitys chapter of Alliance for Change, an organization that helps people transition from prison and re-enter communities.

Zaki highlighted pod-mapping as potential inspiration. The approach has been championed by the Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective, an Oakland-based group.

Pods are meant to be a way to deal with small harms by relying on a group of trusted friends or neighbors. For example, instead of calling the police, a person could reach out to their pod.

To have a relationship founded on community would be kind of a game-changer because you would have people that you know, and hopefully respect and trust, coming to de-escalate your situations, Zaki said.

Lingappa is a fellow with theCalMatters College Journalism Network, a collaboration between CalMatters and student journalists from across California. This story and other higher education coverage are supported by the College Futures Foundation.

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Private Colleges Want More Power To Police Trespassers. Here's What You Need To Know - LAist

My first book will be published on 3June. Its titledThe Case Against the Sexual Revolutionand it pretty much does what it says on the tin. My argument is that the sexual revolution that began in the 1960s has mostly not been of benefit to women.

As I write this, the first reviews are being published, as well as several extracts, and the word "provocative" is coming up a lot, as I thought it probably would.The Sunday Timesis running a very alarming poll on its website asking readers: "Do you agree with Louise Perrys opinions?" I gulped when I first saw this, but have since been pleasantly surprised to see that about three quarters of respondents have so far answered "yes", suggesting that, if I am a provocateur, then I am not an especially outrageous one.

The level of interest that the book has attracted pre-publication has startled me, although there have been rumblings in the media for a while suggesting an imminent backlash against the excesses of the sexual revolution. My friend Katherine Dee an American writer and expert in the history of internet culture has for several years been predicting a swing back against the dominance of sex positive feminism in prominent spaces, and in recent months has found herself vindicated, with theGuardianannouncingthat Gen Z was turning its back on sex-positive feminism and theNew York Timessaying that the ideology wasfalling out of fashion.

The plea of the mournful revolutionary, when faced with the terrible consequences of his utopianism, has always been that real communism has never been tried. This, too, is increasingly the go-to explanation for sexual revolutionaries who are dismayed at where we find ourselves as a culture. If the consequences for women of sexual liberation have beenmoreviolence,moreabuse andmoreunhappiness as I argue is true then their solution has to beyetmoreliberation, if the revolution is going to be waged right to its bloody end.

On paper, there seems to be nothing wrong with a school of feminism that is designed to maximise individual freedom and challenge the shame and repression associated with traditional sexual cultures. In practice, however, pressing the "more liberation" button over and over again is never going to solve the problems that feminists are concerned with.

As the socialist historian RH Tawney wrote almost a century ago, freedom for the pike is death for the minnows. Tawney was writing about the rich and the poor, but his observation applies just as well to sexual politics. Of course the factory owner supports free marketisation, and of course his wage slave disagrees the pike and the minnow have different economic interests. This is also true in the sexual marketplace, which has been rapidly deregulated over the last sixty years.

The playing field is not a level one because the sexually dimorphic nature of our species has produced certain important asymmetries between men and women. Firstly, there is a substantial difference in strength and size, which means that almost all men can kill almost all women with their bare hands, but not vice versa. And then there is the fact that only women can get pregnant, and it is therefore women who bear (literally) the potential consequences of any heterosexual encounter.

Modern contraception partially flattens this asymmetry, but unreliably. And even if the physical differences between men and women can be disguised by technology, we still cannot eradicate the psychological differences that persist despite all our best efforts.

And we shouldnt try to eradicate them. I dont accept the idea that having sex like a man is an obvious route by which women can live happier and healthier lives. Nor do I think that encouraging women to behave more like men in every other area of life is necessarily to womens benefit.

Kathleen Stock (who wrote the foreword to my book), haswrittencritically of the dream of gender abolition and its sometimes troubling consequences: "In a real-life approximation of an attempt at gender abolition that is, during Maos Cultural Revolution there were still sex-associated norms for women. These norms dictated that women should behave more like men. As the slogan went: 'Times have changed. Whatever men comrades can do, women comrades can do too.' ... In practice this norm meant that women under Mao faced the double burden of heavy agricultural work duties in addition to domestic and child-rearing ones."

One consequence of this historical attempt at gender abolition was that pregnant and postpartum women were given the same work tasks and hours as their comrades, resulting in many cases of miscarriage and haemorrhaging. Men and women are not the same, and it is usually women who suffer when we pretend otherwise.

Sex-positive feminism is just one instantiation of a larger liberal movement intent on maximising individual freedom which is a fine project, up to a point. But the push for ever greater freedom is now butting up against the limits of our biology, and thus a feminist movement that was once concerned only with securing liberty for women finds itself in a futile war with nature.

It doesnt need to be this way. I think there is an alternative school of feminism brewing, one that has emerged out of the failed experiment of sexual liberation, and which takes seriously the hard limits imposed by sexual difference. Interviewers keep asking me what this movement is called, and I dont know what to tell them. "Post-liberal feminism", perhaps? Or "reactionary feminism", as my friend Mary Harrington (jokingly) calls it? Im not sure. What I do know is that it cant come too soon.

This piece appears in the forthcoming issue of the New Statesman magazine,subscribe here.

[See also: South Korea's new president weaponises anti-feminism to win election]

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Louise Perry: feminists have fallen for the illusion of limitless liberty - The New Statesman

The state plans to begin issuing $850 checks to eligible taxpayers this week and expects to have the vast majority mailed by the end of the month if state officials can find enough envelopes.

The supplemental budget proposed by Gov. Janet Mills and approved by lawmakers in April allocated about $730 million for the checks as a way to use one-time surplus funds to help taxpayers cope with inflation.

The Legislatures Appropriations and Financial Affairs Committee effectively cleared the way Tuesday for the state to begin issuing the checks by granting permission to process some of the funds ahead of schedule. The budget called for distributing roughly half this month and the rest beginning in July, Jenny Boyden, the associate commissioner of the Department of Administrative Financial Affairs, said during an appearance before the budget-writing committee on Tuesday.

But Boyden said Maine Revenue Services expects to issue about 200,000 checks a week, beginning later this week, and asked for a waiver to provide the refunds as quickly as possible.

We are requesting the additional allotment to ensure the (Department of Revenue Services) is able to process all payments as soon as administratively feasible, Boyden said. Assuming there are no glitches, we could send out a significant portion of checks in June.

One of the glitches may be a shortage of stationery. Global supply chain problems are delaying deliveries of paper products, including the envelopes needed to deliver the checks.

One thing that may slow down processing is envelopes, she said.

Boyden said the department has about 250,000 envelopes on hand. It ordered 800,000 more in February, she said, but delivery is expected to be delayed until late June or early July. That means the state could run out of envelopes after the second week of issuing checks.

Boyden said they are looking to use envelopes from the state treasurers office if the others do not arrive on time.

Concerns about the rising cost of food and gas are expected to be a central issue in this falls campaign cycle, with state Republican leaders looking to blame Gov. Janet Mills and state Democrats even though inflation is a national and global problem.

In response to concerns about rising costs, Mills proposed sending more than half of the states $1.2 billion projected budget surplus to eligible taxpayers. Lawmakers approved providing relief to taxpayers in the form of $850 checks after Republicans successfully fought to include about 58,000 households with higher incomes.

While legislative Republicans embraced the idea, former Gov. Paul LePage, who is challenging Mills this fall, called it a gimmick. Instead, LePage called for a reduction in and ultimately the abolition of state income taxes, which account for about 40 percent of the state budget. Budget forecasters have said future revenue projections are volatile, and LePage has not detailed how he would meet possible revenue shortfalls in future budgets. His past efforts to abolish the income tax were rejected by lawmakers from both parties.

The one-time relief checks approved by the Legislature will be mailed to about 858,000 Mainers. The Mills administration rejected the idea of using direct deposits to issue the checks, in part to avoid errors associated with people changing bank accounts or having their taxes filed by a professional who provided a different bank account. The state has the mailing address of all taxpayers but doesnt have bank account numbers for a large number of them.

To be eligible, individuals must file a Maine individual tax return as a full-time resident by Oct. 31, 2022, not be claimed as a dependent on anothers tax return and have a federal adjusted gross income of less than $100,000 as individuals (or if married and filing separately), less than $150,000 as head of household or less than $200,000 for couples filing jointly.

Mills originally proposed income limits of $75,000 for an individual and $150,000 for couples filing jointly.

TAX RETURN REQUIRED

Boyden told lawmakers Tuesday that the state and community partners will work to make sure people who dont usually file tax returns file a return by October in order to receive a payment.

A state official said its not known how many eligible people dont file tax returns and would need to do so to receive a check.

We expect that elderly and disabled Mainers living on fixed incomes (Social Security, SSDI, military pension, military disability, etc.) account for the majority of non-filers, said Anya Trundy, chief of legislative and strategic operations at the Department of Administrative and Financial Services. More broadly speaking, non-filers are low-income Mainers (including elderly and disabled) who didnt earn enough income in 2021 to incur a tax liability and therefore arent required to file a return.

She said the nonprofit Maine Equal Justice is conducting outreach to low-income residents throughout the summer, while the AARP is holding a series of drop-in clinics for retirees and others on fixed incomes. Several state agencies, including the departments of health and human services, education and labor, and the Bureau of Motor Vehicles, also are getting the word out. And she said the state is working with the constituent services offices of the House and Senate to ensure that accurate information about refunds is included in mailings.

Thats two touches per address, Boyden said.

The status of refund checks can be checked online at portal.maine.gov/refundstatus/payment

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State to begin issuing $850 checks this week, but envelopes in short supply - Press Herald