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You’ve been convicted of a crime. You’ve (perhaps) served jail or prison time, paid your debt to society, and you’re done. You step out of those jailhouse doors absolutely free!
Haha. Hahaha.
Welcome to Part 5 of How Courts Actually Work. Part 1 (Why are police so bad at investigation?), Part 2 (How to pay money to leave jail), Part 3 (What is a trial and how), and Part 4 (Why prison?) are all available on my tumblr.
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In our current criminal punishment bureaucracy, realistically no one gets released without being on some form of “community supervision.” This may sound unfamiliar to you, but you’ve heard of it before, usually in the forms of “parole” or “probation.”
It works like this.
Once you are released, you report first to your parole/probation officer. (I’m going to be using “probation” here because my jurisdiction has abolished parole; see last post. This is essentially equally applicable to parole, though.) They have you sign a set of rules. These rules usually have some variation of the following:
1: NO CRIME.
2: Get a job, keep a job. (Exception is if you are disabled and on Social Security disability income.)
3. Always tell the truth to the probation officer and let them visit your house.
4: NO DRUG. NO ALCOHOL (maybe). NO GUN.
5: Call your probation officer if anything happens at all at any time and get their permission to do normal adult things.
There are some more subtle variations like don’t live with anyone else convicted of a felony, and there can also be “special” conditions like submit to drug treatment, or register on the sex offender registry, or no contact with your ex.
On the surface, these things seem more or less simple: lots of adults every day in America get by with no alcohol, gun, drug, crime. However. You start running into trouble right there at “job.” It’s pretty commonly known that having a crime on your record makes finding a job A Lot Worse, so I’m not going to harp on that one; we all know. If you were hiring, you’d probably consider it, especially before you read this and realized how stupid most successfully prosecuted crimes are.
Let’s talk about no drug, alcohol. You will probably be required to do random drug and alcohol screens (they can detect the byproducts of alcohol in your urine, so buckle up, you’re still on the hook for that one). You will be observed peeing. It will be humiliating. That will be the least of it. You’re like: no problem, I don’t do drugs. Hold on, my friend.
Pretty much every “scheduled drug” (drugs that are classified according to potential for abuse) has benign/legal compounds that create false positives. Gabapentin can create a false positive for benzodiazepines (like Xanax, Valium, etc). Effexor can create false positives for methamphetamine. So can Prozac or beta blockers. Adderall creates a correct positive for amphetamines, but is, let’s be clear, one of the safest and most effective psychiatric medications for any condition on the market. Various cold and flu remedies can give false positives. Depending on how they are washed and processed, poppy seeds can still give false positives for marijuana. Antihistamines, Benadryl, and ibuprofen can show up as PCP. Seroquel shows up like methadone.
In a simple drug screen, none of these are distinguished from each other. All a drug screen does is show yes/no. A more complex drug test (off to the lab!) is required to distinguish. Probation officers may not want to send a test to the lab, may believe you’re lying about what you took, and may attempt to intimidate you into signing admissions for drug use. Given that a probation officer can have you arrested without a warrant or any kind of judicial approval, their threats are gonna seem pretty important!
So that’s the problem with drug screens and their accuracy. How about timing?
One of the most common ways to do random drug screens is called “color code.” People have to call in every (day? week?) by a certain time to hear whether their “color” is up for a random screen. If it is, they have to find a way to get in to the probation office to get tested. With lack of transportation, spotty cell access, and potentially great distances to the probation office, as well as punishing work schedules in places that will fire you if you miss your job without notice, these can be a problem. Moreover, those of you with executive dysfunction should be wincing right now, because you know that correctly calling in every week at the right time is going to be a problem for someone who’s drowning.
In addition, probation will almost certainly require you to go and do some kind of treatment for something, these days. It’s usually drug treatment, but sometimes psychological treatment. These groups will be whatever is cheap and available, which means it’ll likely be during business hours. Pray to your gods that your Early Recovery Skills group is available by phone and you can fit it in your lunch break, or otherwise your constant need to drive to the probation office to go to that appointment is going to lose you your job.
And, oops, you violated probation.
Or you could skip the Early Recovery, keep the job, and –
Sorry, no, you’ve violated your probation.
You missed Early Recovery because it was a shift you couldn’t reschedule, but you can make it in next week! Okay but if you miss one more you’re terminated from the class, and, you guessed it –
Violation.
Folks, probation is actually pretty hard and complicated. In addition, it does not help the people who are going through it. Like, in an ideal world, we’re talking: people get out of jail, and someone keeps an eye on them to make sure they don’t return to a Life of Crime and to help hook them up with the right job programs to give them something to strive for. In reality, they go straight from being institutionalized and subject to a rigid routine to being free and needing to jump through what’s actually an incredible number of hoops, very quickly.
It’s hard to be an adult and alive. Imagine being an adult and alive who has to stay out of jail by doing a bunch of extra shit!
It’s important to note that probation was not always this way. Not everyone used to get probation, and not every violation turned into jail time. There has been a noticeable change.
According to the Office of Justice Programs, about 1 in 6 offenders admitted to prison in 1980 were there for probation or parole violations. In 2021 and 2022, the percentage that were there for violations of probation or parole was 44-45%. From 17% in 1980 to 45% in 2022.
From 17% in 1980 to 45% in 2022.
From 17% to 45%.
Are you starting to understand why the population of our prisons skyrocketed between 1980 and 2010?
The reality of probation and parole now is that you can’t get free. There are too many requirements. It’s made for failure. And even if you do complete your requirements completely, even if you are picture perfect on probation, you will never stop paying for what you did, because criminal records are forever.
In my jurisdiction, this includes juvenile records. If you have any conviction as a juvenile, it will last past your adulthood. A misdemeanor will stick around until you’re 21 or after 5 years has passed, whichever is longer. A felony will stick around forever (but might not prevent you from voting or buying a gun after the age of 29!).
Okay, okay, you say, at least tell me that all this probation, all these violations, have done something. Have they made people safer? Have they reduced crime?
Uh, apparently? No. Extra-intense supervision has been studied with relation to both low-risk and high-risk offenders, and it doesn’t help community safety with either one. What it does do is send more of them to prison in the first two years of probation. Same with extra-long terms of probation. Same with kids on probation. There’s no point; there’s no benefit.
If I bring this up to a prosecutor, you know what they have always said? Literally, without any exception? All of them?
“Okay, we’ll just put them in jail instead.”
Coool. Cool cool cool. That’s the point you should take from this, for sure.
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Let’s talk about the impact of this incredible explosion in extra jail time.
This is felt most keenly in poor communities. (Especially poor communities that are black or Latino.) Remember when I was talking about investigations, and how nearly every case is low-hanging easy fruit? That stuff is all from poor communities. Search a beaten-up car, and the odds are pretty decent that you’ll find, somewhere in the trash, a used baggy or bit of pipe that has some drug residue on it. Bam, drug felony, and that person’s in the system.
Every time one of these people goes to jail, those closest to them are seriously affected. You’re taking away single parents and primary wage-earners, and putting them behind bars long enough for them to lose their jobs, apartments, and cars, and have all of their possessions carted off to the dump, kicked to the curb, or destroyed. Imagine starting from zero. Imagine starting from zero with your credit score shattered because you couldn’t make your car payments because you were in prison for not going to your Early Recovery Skills group.
Kids are deprived of their parents not once, not twice, but over and over again over the course of childhood. They’re deprived of the food and shelter that adult could maintain for them. They see their parent get sucked back again and again. How is a kid like that supposed to have any hope for the future? How are they supposed to feel about themselves when they constantly see their dad over a tablet at a jail, fifteen minutes at a time?
Figures indicate that as many as a third of black men spend time in jail or prison over the course of their lives. Those black men and their sons are wrenched apart. Their futures are squeezed dry because Joe Senator doesn’t want to pay for another program. The kids are deprived at school, stereotyped, and eventually arrested. When they’re arrested and sentenced, more money is spent on them to lock them up a single year than has been spent on their education and medical care over the course of a lifetime.
In the meantime, the Atlantic is writing articles about our Generation of Loneliness. They note that in the inner city, facilities that used to be public are only opening behind locked doors. Pools, clubhouses, sports fields? Community gathering centers? They don’t exist anymore. These kids have nowhere to go. If they go into foster care, and dare to express any non-positive emotion, especially the older kids, they’re likely to be shunted off to restrictive and locked mental health facilities that are rife with abuse and corruption, and that, on the surface, look a hell of a lot like jails.
I’m off-topic.
What leaves me speechless with my clients isn’t that so many of them fail. It’s that some of them actually succeed. In the midst of the economy and more stacked endlessly against them, they manage to trick Medicaid into funding drug treatment programs long-term, or they find programs that act as job resources too. They build themselves up from the ashes they started with. And they thrive.
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Let’s talk about penalties for probation violations.
My jurisdiction, a couple years ago, switched up the penalties. If you do a “technical violation” – that is, if you don’t get a new criminal charge, and instead you just fail a drug test or don’t keep employment – your first time carries no jail time. Second time, a few weeks.
Great! That’s a step in the right direction.
Again, not so fast. “Technical violations” did not include “special conditions of probation.” You know, the ones like sex offender registries and no contact with exes? So, when faced with this limitation on their previously unlimited power to sentence for violations, judges began to list every
single
condition
as a special condition of probation, in their sentencing orders.
When the Court of Appeals shot this down, they started putting in any possible way they could expand those conditions to make it a special condition.
And it’s worked.
You have to “follow the probation officer’s recommendations for drug treatment.” But if the court orders a special condition of drug treatment, and you don’t go? That’s a special condition violation, not a technical violation, and now you can get jail time for it.
Yes, courts responded to this clear signal of legislative intent by directly attempting to bypass it and give people more jail time. This should not be surprising. Judges sentence people to jail, and they have to believe that it works. Ego protection and confirmation bias entrench them in this position over the course of decades.
For a special condition violation, you could get all of your suspended time back.
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Let’s talk about an example in a previous post, Jane, who gets 3 years with 2 years suspended. Jane is ordered into drug treatment. Jane can’t juggle it, mostly because of transportation. She gets 2 full years revoked. She appeals it – this is wrong!
The Court of Appeals will tell her: you can’t appeal this jail time. It was previously imposed on you back when you agreed to your deal. It’s too late now.
Let’s go back in time. Say Jane appeals it at the time, and says that two years of suspended time is too much. You know what the Court of Appeals would say?
You can’t appeal that jail time. It’s not imposed; you don’t have to serve it. You have no grounds for appeal. It’s just suspended. It may never happen to you.
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To my authors reading this: there is almost no possible way that you can make a bureaucracy more nonsensical than our criminal justice system already is. You will, in fact, probably have to tone it down, if you’re going to write about it. This is one big reason that nobody knows what a clusterfuck it is.
idk, y'all, I think I’ve basically covered it. If anyone has specific questions about aspects of this – appointed lawyers? Jury selection? Juvenile law? – let me know and I’ll do my best. Again, I’ve been a practicing lawyer going on ten years. I don’t mind spilling the bean tea.
Well this is horrifying
Yes! Correct!
So I decided to check out laws for parole here in Norway, and generally speaking (to my surprise) we actually have the same permissive language allowing the parole officer equivalent to impose these kinds of mutually exclusive conditions about being drug free, meeting at check ins, and needing to be either looking for or having a job.
Language permits one violation before you can be brought back to court with aim of putting you back in jail for the rest of your prison sentence (which has a legal limit of 21 years for the combined sentences in Norway)
One saving grace is that it’s illegal to fire someone for fulfilling a legal obligation (and, in general, firing people is difficult and time consuming).
I think this demonstrates that
1) many many harm reduction and social support programs in Norway help a great deal on the front end in preventing crime, and
2) the lack of the Americanized war on drugs, and the violence it inflicts on generations after generations also prevents some of the actual harm perpetrated by the government
3) what a good sentence cap.
It also shows that
4) everywhere has stupid ideas and does stupid shit and thinks they’re helping.
But also I really appreciate the addition and I found it very interesting!
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prodigious reader, chronic forgetter
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David Brooks is a writer who purports to explain America even though he spends one hundred percent of his time shuttling between the New York Times building and the Aspen Ideas Festival. You can see how this might leave a gap in his knowledge. He fills this gap with endless amounts of pop psychology, always ready to latch onto a new sociological theory to explain why poor people don’t understand fancy sandwiches. Brooks is the most prominent example of the “guy you made an excuse to walk away from at the party because every time you said something he replied, ‘you know, I read an interesting theory about that.’” Had he not landed at the Times, he could have had a more appropriate career as a bad personal therapist. There, he could have only misled one person at a time, whereas journalism gives him the opportunity to mislead millions.
Though Brooks’ original position was as the Times’ in-house conservative, you need only spend one second gazing at him giving a TED Talk in a quarter-zip fleece to know that the Republicans left him behind long ago. This leaves him in the odd position of being a man who gives advice for a living while having no idea what just happened to his own party. Needless to say, this has not stopped him from writing things. He engages in self-reflection the same way that a newscaster on live TV picks his nose: quickly, leaving no evidence that it ever happened.
Now, Brooks is alarmed for our country. He is able to see that Trumpism is destroying our country, but his own intellectual toolbox, stuffed with Steven Pinker books and course catalogs from Yale, is comically unsuited to deal this this moment in history. His response is to write a long article in The Atlantic titled “America Needs a Mass Movement—Now.”
If you’re thinking to yourself, “David Brooks calling for a mass movement in the pages of The Atlantic is like me calling for a parade of supermodels to come date me as I sit in my cousin Roy’s garage surrounded by half-eaten chicken wings,” well—yes. Yes, this is accurate. It is a measure of the depth of our national crisis that I am going to try to offer a good faith critique of Brooks’ arguments here, rather than just trying to point and laugh and mutter about how mind-blowing it is that he still has a job. No! No I won’t! Because surviving this descent into fascism will require, ugh, unity, and that will require all of us to accept bizarre new allies, with grace. Or with some measure of grace. Our derision must be leavened with grace, at least.
Watching Brooks waste many thousands of words trying to explain the rise of a racist reality show host who has never read a book as a product of “the writings of people such as Albert Jay Nock, James Burnham, Sam Francis, Pat Buchanan, and Christopher Lasch” is amusing and all, sure. But the broader flailings of Brooks do, I think, have a real value. His sense of being overwhelmed by the daily onslaught of outrages from the Trump administration prompts him to desperately try to construct coherent explanations in line with his existing worldview—something many of us have done! And his sense of dread in the face of onrushing fascism pushes him to the conclusion that, as our institutions fail, only a mass movement will be capable of saving us—something many of us have concluded! In this sense, Brooks is an unlikely everyman in this moment; just another alarmed American frantically yelling, “Why don’t people do something???”
The sentiment is understandable. Even laudable. The specifics of Brooks’ ideas, though, are pretty dumb. Steeped as he is in the world of elite punditry, he sees the problem before us not as one of changing the material conditions of the world, but rather as one of constructing “a more accurate and compelling narrative” that will convince all of the dazzled Regular Folks that they were wrong to follow this fella. This tendency, endemic among pundits, to see changes in society as nothing more than the outcome of a battle between competing thinkpieces leads Brooks to waste much space filtering his desire for a movement through the lens of messaging, as if the key to bringing millions of people into the streets is striking the exact right tone. This allows him the intellectual security blanket of imagining that our uncertain future can be tamed by using just the right Richard Hofstadter quote, and that we can spin up an an “anti-populist social movement” by creating “a competing cascade of mini-dramas.” The solution to fascism, you see, lies in winning the news cycle.
As a writer, I sympathize with this fantasy. What America needs is a better narrative, and who can create it? Heroes like me! This fantasy is shared by millions of relatively educated liberals who cling to the belief that Trump can be defeated if only the wishy-washy media would finally publish the perfect, cutting headline about how This Guy Is Bad. Ah, what a sweet world it would be if it were that simple. In truth, we are in much deeper shit than that. Saving our democracy—and building our mass movement—is going to be much harder than that, and much more disappointingly prosaic.
In the same way that we on the left must gracefully accept our new allies in the fight against fascism, people like David Brooks must also have the grace to be quiet when they find themselves out of their depth. You want a movement? Brother, there are people who have been neck-deep in social and political movements for their whole lives, right here in America. Ask them what to do! They know! One of the reasons why it is hard to build and sustain movements is that it is more fun to be “a wealthy pundit basking in praise for your brilliant insights” than it is to be “one of a million anonymous people acting in solidarity with a million more.” David Brooks does not need to give us any more social theories. The best thing that he, and others like him, can do right now is to learn how to follow, not lead.
The final three sentences of Brooks’ piece are revealing. “Cultural and intellectual change comes first—a new vision,” he writes. “Social movements come second. Political change comes last.” Note that this formulation places visionary intellectuals such as David Brooks as the protagonists of all occurrences. This is false. Note also that the only sorts of change mentioned are “cultural and intellectual”—the things that David Brooks likes to focus on—and not, for example, “economic.” This inescapable urge to place himself at the very center of the world is why people like David Brooks are not incisive political thinkers. And why they are a real pain in the ass in union meetings.
Union meetings! Heard of that? Union meetings happen in unions. Unions are things that once covered a full third of working Americans. Now they cover less than a tenth. That decline, and the accompanying decline of power for the working class and rise in economic and political power of the rich, does more to explain how we got here than all of the books that David Brooks has ever written. Happily, it offers a hint that America has done this before. And we can do it again.
Unions are part of the labor movement. Movement! There’s that word. The labor movement rose from the awful conditions of industrial capitalism and fought decades worth of bloody battles in the streets in order to reach the point that it could fight its battles in the halls of Congress instead. The labor movement used the simple concept of worker solidarity to painstakingly build real power for people who were treated as if they had none. The power of the labor movement grew strong enough to create America’s golden age of shared prosperity, and has since been ground down by the forces of investor capitalism to such a degree that we find ourselves once again plunged into a morass of plutocracy. But we know how to get out. It ain’t a mystery, brother.
America does need a mass movement now, David Brooks. You’re right about that. Once you realize that, the most productive thing to do is not to write ponderous Atlantic essays implying that you alone can guide us, but rather to join a movement. Join a union and become a part of the labor movement. Join DSA and become a part of the movement for social democracy. Or join one of the many fine activist groups in this country and become a part of the movement for civil rights or reproductive justice or environmentalism or one of the other worthy causes. Movements have been around forever. All of these movements, joining together, unifying in the shared cause of Not Being Fascist, will be the real base of the mass movement that will—in time, we trust—form as the wall that prevents the bad people from dragging us into the bad place.
Mass movements sound dramatic. But they are not built dramatically. They are built through many, many mundane actions. Talking to people. Making a list. Knocking on doors. Planning a meeting. Going to the meeting. Setting up for the meeting. Participating in the meeting. Cleaning up after the meeting. Planning the next meeting. On and on. You get to go hurl rocks at the barricades sometimes, yes, but you can’t just do that part, and not do the meetings. This is why the real heroes of mass movements are… the masses. Not the guy who gets in the spotlight to announce his unique plan to save us all—all the people who actually do all the stuff.
We need someone to take notes at the meeting. David? Welcome to the group. Can you take notes for us today? Thank you for participating. We’re glad to have you here. Truly.
More
Related reading: Columnists and Their Lives of Quiet Desperation; Talking Our Way Forward; There’s No Justice Without Power; The More You Have, the Less You Fight.
I wrote a book about the labor movement, and how it can in fact be the mass movement we need right about now. You can order a copy wherever books are sold, but if you are David Brooks, I will be happy to send you a free copy. Email me brother!
If you want to organize your workplace, contact EWOC. If you want to get out in the streets and yell, go to one of the many protests happening nationwide this Saturday. After that, organize your workplace.
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The tidal waters of Maine tell stories that go back thousands of years. Along the Damariscotta River, a short tidal river carved out by retreating glaciers at the end of the last Ice Age, the story of the wild oyster is told through heaps of bleached-white oyster shells discarded by prehistoric people The Whaleback Shell Midden, in the town of Damariscotta, is one of the most remarkable: 1,000 feet wide and 30 feet tall, it is a tale of bygone abundance.
While wild oysters were an important part of an Indigenous diet in what is now Maine, by the 1900s they had all but disappeared. Most people considered them functionally extinct, in fact, until this spring, when researchers from the University of Maine published a study confirming their return, often in close proximity to the oyster farms that have populated the waterfront over the last few decades.
“When we think about the emergence of wild oysters, it’s bringing back a part of the ecosystem that has been a part of who we are as people in this place, part of Indigenous people’s connections to this place,” says Heather Leslie, a marine conservation scientist who took part in the study. “It foregrounds the question of not just restoring the non-human parts of the ecosystem but also enabling the Native people to reconnect with coastal ecosystems.”
“When we think about the emergence of wild oysters, it’s bringing back a part of the ecosystem that has been a part of who we are as people in this place.”
Oysters sequester carbon and help filter sea water, making them one of nature’s most beneficial bivalves. Their appearance may be a boon for the ecosystem of the Damariscotta River and the local economy. But the rediscovery isn’t all good news: It is also a sign of warming waters that can imperil other species.
As filter feeders, oysters help to remove natural and unnatural contaminants, such as algae and pollutants, from the water. The state of Maine has encouraged oyster farming as a way to maintain clean waterways, which are at higher risk of harmful algal blooms as waters warm.
Those warming waters are not only more prone to contaminants, they are also becoming too hot for Maine’s most iconic harvest, the lobster, whose migration north will likely upset a longstanding way of life on the Maine coast.
A Comeback Story
Oyster industry experts have proposed many reasons for the disappearance of Maine’s wild oysters. One hypothesis is that the Gulf Stream—a warm current in the North Atlantic that operates like a river within an ocean—shifted gradually in the late 1800s, causing the Gulf of Maine to cool. The change killed off oysters, which prefer slightly warmer temperatures.
Additionally, in the late 1800s, oysters had a heyday of popularity among European settlers—not unlike the booming appetite for them today. The craze for oysters subsided when the bivalve population was severely depleted.
The owner of Maine’s Pemaquid Oyster Company and local historian, Smokey McKeen, has farmed oysters in the Damariscotta River since the 1980s. (Photo credit: Kayli McKeen)
Another leading cause of oyster decline was the rise of the New England state’s sawmills.
“The upper Damariscotta River had 20 shipyards,” explains Smokey McKeen, local historian and co-founder of the Pemaquid Oyster Company. “What were they going to do with the sawdust? Well, why not just dump it in the river?”
Oysters feed on ambient algae, plankton, and bacteria as they draw in the water around them. They can help keep estuaries clear and healthy by filtering out bacteria, but too much sediment, such as sawdust, can kill them.
In the mid 1980s, long after the sawdust had settled, three oyster farms opened in relatively quick succession in the Damariscotta River, bringing oysters back to Maine’s mid-coast waters. One of these was the Pemaquid Oyster Company, which McKeen established with partners Carter Newell and Dave Barry. The company still grows and sells oysters today.
While a few oyster farmers grow their oysters on the flats of tidal seabeds, most raise the bivalves in submerged cages that have holes to allow water, which contains everything an oyster needs to eat, to flow in and out.
Wild oysters grow on rocks at the tide line on Maine’s coast. (Photo credit: Sarah Risley / University of Maine Darling Center)
Until that point, most oyster farms in Maine had used Belon oysters (Ostrea edulis), a popular French type with a metallic taste that McKeen describes as “like sucking on a pocket full of coins.” The three new Damariscotta River farms were inspired by Herb Hidju, a college professor at the University of Maine, who suggested farming with Eastern oysters (Crassostrea virginica), which were once native in the region and have the sweet, rich and briny taste that oyster lovers go crazy for.
At the fledgling Pemaquid Oyster Company, the Eastern species thrived in the nutrient-rich waters of the Damariscotta River. “All the oysters grew,” remembers McKeen, “and it turned out everybody liked them, and we thought, ‘Huh, well, maybe this is more than just something to do on a Saturday morning.’ It became a thing, and it really ballooned.”
“It turned out everybody liked them, and we thought, ‘Huh, well, maybe this is more than just something to do on a Saturday morning.’”
Oyster farming grew in popularity over the ensuing decades in Maine, and truly started to boom in the 2010s. The Gulf of Maine is warming faster than any other ocean body on the planet, creating ideal conditions for oysters.
Growing oysters is providing new opportunities on Maine’s working waterfront as the warmer temperatures push lobsters out toward cooler waters. Maine’s lobster fishery produced more than $725 million in 2021 and provided tens of thousands of jobs for Mainers. In the past four years, however, that revenue has decreased to $528 million, and in 2024, lobster harvests in the state hit a 15-year low.
A 2025 NOAA study of farmed oysters in South Carolina found that an oyster farm of 1 million oysters removed the equivalent of around 300 pounds of nitrogen from the water. State and federal dollars now encourage oyster farms, and programs like Maine Sea Grant see oysters as a climate savior and an alternative to diminishing resources like lobster.
Aquaculture is now an integral part of Maine’s working waterfront, with more than 150 oyster farms along the coast.
Breaking Into the Wild
As Mainers started to farm oysters, they noticed an unintended consequence: Wild oysters began to appear. The new wild populations tend to be near oyster farms and of the same variety thatthe farms are cultivating.
The farmed oysters are not “escaping,” though; they are spawning, in a process often triggered by warm water temperatures. Male and female oysters release eggs and sperm into the ocean, where they create larvae that drifts around on the current in search of a suitable substrate.
The “wilds” frequently attach themselves to rocks along the tide line, sometimes drifting many yards away from the oyster farms that spawned them. Further spawning by the wild oysters can lead to wild oyster populations thriving in intertidal zones even farther away.
These wild oysters are harvested by people holding shellfishing licenses, both commercial and recreational. They currently supply the small but growing market for wild oysters, selling to a few restaurants, seafood markets, and to existing oyster farms that make them available to the public.
Pickers can be salty characters, some of the last true foragers of the coast. They spend long days on the mud flats at low tide, bent over holes that they dig with specialized rakes, seeking out soft-shell clams, the most commonly harvested shellfish in Maine. They often gather wild oysters too; the stationary creatures can be a relief to find as they only need to be pried off the rocks exposed at low tide, rather than dug out of the thick mud.
Once seed oysters reach a certain size, the staff at Pemaquid Oyster Company move them to floating nursery bags. When the oyster seeds reach 50 mm, they are bottom-planted in the company’s large open-water lease and harvested one to two years later. Here, the Pemaquid crew heads out for the first fall bottom planting of 2023. (Photo credit: Pemaquid Oyster Company)
These breakout oysters are more than a food source; they’re an ecological signal. And researchers want to understand what their return means.
In 2023 and 2024, University of Maine marine science PhD candidate Sarah Risley, along with professor Leslie, conducted surveys of intertidal zones, counting and measuring oysters to understand the baseline population. And in the spring of 2025, they published the study confirming the increasing presence of wild oysters in the Damariscotta River.
One of Risley’s areas of interest is whether these oysters, most likely spawned from farmed oyster cages, can create their own reproducing populations. “We are thinking about how the connection between the two populations might play into oyster restoration,” explains Risley. “Where the project is moving now is thinking about how we take this information about emerging populations and put it to use creating sustaining populations.”
Farmed oysters come in two varieties: Triploids are essentially sterile, and diploids can reproduce. The farmers on the Damariscotta River largely work with diploids, but there are still questions as to how hardy and reproductive a population “going native” might be. The work that the University of Maine study has begun will inform shellfish harvesters and ecologists on how best to support a wild oyster population in the Damariscotta, where their emergence is in many ways a return to the natural ecosystem of the river.
Still, shellfish harvesters have raised concerns about the possibility of wild oysters outcompeting the decreasing population of soft-shell clams for resources.
Others note that the clam population’s decline had been observedfor many years before wild oysters began appearing in the river. Also, new invasive species such as the aggressive European green crab, which eats the clams and can erode the ecosystem they need to survive, are a more significant threat.
“They may be looking for a correlation where there are more oysters,” explains Jacqueline Clarke, a seafood expert and co-founder of Nor’Easter Oyster Company, in South Bristol, Maine. “But there are so many other factors, like water temperatures, green crabs—all that fun stuff.”
The Next Chapter
Maine’s accidental oyster rewilding may also be a business opportunity. One of the most successful oyster farms in the state is Glidden Point Oysters which, like Pemaquid Oyster Company, farms its bivalves in the nutrient-rich waters of the Damariscotta River.
The farmers at Glidden Point not only sell their own oysters; they also wholesale oysters from other farms in Maine and ship them around the country—and, when they can source enough from shellfish harvesters, they sell wild oysters too.
“I love the wilds,” says Ryan McPherson, owner of Glidden Point. Like all oysters, the taste of a wild oyster is informed by place. Because they grow in the intertidal areas, they’re usually overhung by rockweed (a type of seaweed), and sometimes pick up its briny flavor. “They have more of a toothiness to them,” says Risley.
Oyster farmers pull cages from the dock at Glidden Point on the Damariscotta River. The farm stores oysters in the water to maintain their freshness. (Photo credit: Glidden Point Oysters)
Still, selling wild oysters has its own challenges. Wild oysters vary in appearance, without the deep cup and correspondingly plump meat typical of farmed oysters. “They’re variable sizes and they’re inconsistent shapes,” says McPherson. “And they’re harder to shuck, compared to farmed oysters. You have to find somebody who really wants them, wants to tell their story at their restaurant.”
For anyone interested in tasting a wild oyster, the process is not always as simple as heading to your local Maine oyster bar. Wild Damariscotta oysters can be ordered online through Glidden Point Oyster Company, which sources them from Maine shellfish harvesters, but they are harder to find on menus than the farmed varieties.
Jacqueline Clarke points out that while wild oysters have been missing from the Maine coast for many decades, they have been part of the state’s coastline longer than they’ve been absent. “They’ve been around for thousands upon thousands of years, everywhere, up and down the coast, and definitely in the Damariscotta,” she says.
To forage or eat a wild oyster along the mineral-rich waters of the Damariscotta is to bridge the centuries, to connect Maine’s ancient past with its present. In that sense, the new population is not just a harbinger of change, but a symbol of resilience.
The post Wild Oysters Make a Comeback in Maine appeared first on Civil Eats.
A few years ago, when the conversation over the racist nickname and racist iconography of the NFL team that maintained racist hiring policies longer than any other NFL team was a sad constant in the sports media discourse, I was embedding with the dictionary publisher Merriam-Webster. Merriam was letting me cosplay as a lexicographer to write a book about the future of the dictionary in a digital world. I traveled regularly to the company's old brick building on a hill in Springfield, Mass.—a few blocks from a strip club called the 5th Alarm Lounge, near the fire station—to watch the language sausage get made, and make some of my own.
That meant I had access to the Consolidated Files: 16 million three-by-five slips of paper, known as citations, or "cits"—pronounced sites—with examples of word usage culled for more than a century from newspapers, magazines, academic publications, trade journals, contemporary fiction, advertisements, radio transcripts, television shows, annual reports, government reports, cereal boxes, photo captions, comic strips, seed catalogs, restaurant menus, car manuals, airline tickets, you name it. The slips are crammed into alphabetized drawers in rows of chest-high, brick- or tan-colored metal filing cabinets of varying sizes and styles that stretch around the second-floor editorial room like dominoes.
