Board of Directors

Josh Miller
Chairman

Peter Lehman, PhD
Vice Chair

Peter Lehman, PhD, is a founding member of MERN. He is a person in long-term recovery who taught sociology and criminology at USM until being incarcerated for a six-year sentence at the old prison in Thomaston and at Bolduc. He was released in 2003.  

While at Bolduc Correctional Facility he was active tutoring students, acting as inmate advocate, doing the flower gardening, pursuing his own education and recovery, and working for the substance abuse department. While incarcerated, he completed seven University courses on addiction and counseling and developed and taught an intensive six-week course for residents dealing with addiction, recovery, and relapse. 

Since then, Dr. Lehman has been active in the recovery community, has helped develop reentry support programs and initiatives. In addition to his work in MERN, he has been a presence on corrections and other criminal justice issues in the legislature since 2005 as well as providing input and critiques of Department of Corrections policies. 

Amy Frankel
Secretary

Amy Frankel is a licensed master of social work (LMSW) and a PhD candidate at the University of Maine, Orono, where she serves as part-time faculty in the School of Social Work. Amy also completed a professional certificate program in restorative justice at Vermont Law School. She is actively involved in community collaboration in Knox County, where she works with individuals with lived experience in reentry and recovery to discover new ways to mitigate the impact of legal system involvement on individuals, families and communities and promote alternatives to incarceration. Amy lives in Rockport with her partner and two beloved dogs.

Sean Crothers
Chairman Emeritus

Jonathan Sahrbeck

James Macomber

Maria Lamb

Lee Noddin

Bobby Jo Bechard

Myles Ouellette

Elizabeth Simoni

Elizabeth Simoni is the Executive Director of Maine Pretrial Services, Inc., a private non-profit dedicated to pretrial service delivery, treatment recovery court case management, and diversion options across Maine. She has served in her current role since 1996, and prior to that was a pretrial case manager. 

She served for twelve years on the National Association of Pretrial Services Agencies (NAPSA) board of directors, where she co-chaired publication of “The Essential Elements of Pretrial Services Systems and Agencies” and the 2020 and 2024 revisions of the NAPSA Pretrial Release Standards. She has been an active member of the National Institute of Corrections’ (NIC) Pretrial Executive Network since 2009. 

Ms. Simoni serves as a trainer for both NAPSA and NIC. Ms. Simoni previously served for thirteen years as a Maine Department of Corrections certified facilitator for domestic violence accountability courses. She has served as a criminal justice representative of the Co-Occurring Collaborative Serving Maine’s board of directors since 1996, is a board member for the Maine Reentry Network (since 2023) and is a past board member for the New England Association of Recovery Courts. In September 2024, Ms. Simoni received the NAPSA Olgiati Lifetime Achievement award for her national contributions to pretrial justice. She graduated from the University of Maine School of Law (1992), and Michigan State University (1989).

Meeting Information

MERN's board of directors meet on the third Wednesday of every month at 5PM. The public is invited to attend and observe meetings; please send an email to info@re-entrymaine.org if you would like to attend. 

Join the Board

Do you have a passion for helping people reintegrate into society while navigating the issues inherent in a troubled past? Consider joining either one of our board committees or the Board of Directors itself! We are particularly interested in recruiting the following:

Interested applicants should send an email to board@re-entrymaine.org.