Every Monday, for over a decade, we have taken the ferry boat from our Peak Island homes, driven across the spine of southern Maine, and entered through the locked gates of the Maine Correctional Center. Once inside, we meet with women who are learning how to tell the truth, first to themselves, then to the page. Some are young, some are mothers, some are grandmothers. All are human. And all are trying to survive systems that have long since stopped seeing them.

Ashley Bushey was one of those women. She came to our memoir-writing class quietly and guarded; she was the first trans woman in our workshop. A few weeks in, Ashley said something that has never left us: “I used to look in the mirror and ask, ‘Who are you?’ Now I look and say, ‘There you are.’” For her, and for many others, prison — ironically — was the first place she felt fully seen. Not because it offered freedom, but because, for once, it offered recognition.

Now, that fragile promise has been broken.

The U.S. Department of Justice has pulled $1.5 million in federal funding from Maine’s prison system. Why? Because the state made the humane and medically informed decision to house Andrea Balcer, another transgender woman, in a women’s facility. The decision followed thorough psychological evaluations. It aligned with Maine’s longstanding policy of housing people according to their gender identity, when deemed safe and appropriate.

But for this act of recognition, this small insistence on dignity, Maine was punished. And so were the women inside.

What was stripped away? Not abstract dollars, but essential supports:

• The Substance Use Disorder Program, which provided recovery resources to 300 incarcerated people each year.

• The Family Bonding Initiative, or “Lullaby Project,” which allowed incarcerated mothers to record lullabies for their children, bridging a chasm with melody.

• The Probation Support System, a program proven to reduce recidivism and support reentry.

These weren’t luxuries. They were lifelines.

We have seen women sit in our classroom with trembling hands, trying to write through trauma that began in childhood and metastasized into addiction, violence, and incarceration. We’ve watched them find clarity — not absolution, but understanding. These programs gave them something most had never had before: a path toward healing, however narrow, however steep.

To say this funding was pulled “for the sake of women’s safety,” as Attorney General Pam Bondi claimed, is not just disingenuous, it is a grotesque inversion of the truth. What keeps women safe is treatment, connection and support. What has now been taken from them is precisely that.

This is not about safety. It is about punishment — punishment of a state that choose compassion over ideology, medical guidance over political spectacle. And it is the women inside who are paying the price.

We know them. We have sat beside them. We have read their stories. And we have watched as fragile hope, once kindled, is now quietly extinguished by a system that has decided they are expendable.

Maine did the right thing. The federal government’s retaliation is a reminder of how quickly justice can be undone, not with force, but with a quiet, bureaucratic cruelty.

The women we work with are not political pawns. They are poets. Mothers. Survivors. They are more than the worst thing they’ve done and they deserve better than this.