The latest study looked at 243 MonDay inmates who successfully completed their programs there from mid-2006 to mid-2007. It then tracked how they did until 2009. It compared them to like groups of other offenders from around the state, to see whether they did better or worse.
In comparison to a similar group of prison parolees, MonDay’s alums were 8.7 percent more likely to commit a felony, 6.2 percent more likely to be convicted again of any crime and 16.1 percent more likely to be incarcerated again than the comparison group.
MonDay isn’t alone. Jessica Dennis, ODRC spokeswoman, said that nine programs — three half-way houses and six community corrections facilities statewide — seemed to increase recidivism.
“We want to make sure we are investing in the programs that work,” she said.
MonDay, built with state bond money, has been given time by the ODRC to work on its program at 1951 S. Gettysburg Ave., on a campus that includes a homeless shelter and other correctional facilities.
The residents, a mix of offenders who are mostly substance abusers, attend programs on employment readiness, education, anger management and parenting.
They’re organized as a “treatment community” with strict rules of conduct. Each participant is required to interact as a member of a large, extended — and ideally functional — family.
Real day-to-day conflicts get talked out in groups and analyzed as part of therapeutic sessions. Moderators orchestrate the sessions to encourage insight and fix destructive thinking patterns.
At a recent anger management class, Timothy Franks, 36, of Xenia and Brad Steiner, 26, of Lebanon, walked through an earlier dispute about a work list. Both said they learned useful skills in the supervised encounter that included terms like “hostile self-talk” and questions like, “Do I allow somebody to get to me?”
“In the future if this happens, I need to talk it out with somebody,” Steiner said.
Serving several separate court jurisdictions in Southwestern Ohio, MonDay’s staff of 80 work with 200 who must live there for up to 180 days.
Residents are largely from Montgomery County, and MonDay has use of $5.3 million in state funds this year. Residents may decide to drop out of the program at any time and appear before the sentencing judge, who then decides what to do with the inmate. That might include prison or another treatment program.
Overall, looking at incarceration rates of 6,000 who went through community-based programs around Ohio, about 36.7 percent ended up in prison within two years. For MonDay successful program completers, it was 41.6 percent, said study author Ed Latessa, professor and director of the School of Criminal Justice at the University of Cincinnati.
“They did worse across the board, and did not do well in the 2002 study,” Latessa said.
Latessa said MonDay should examine its program structure and the follow-up that participants receive. For example, Latessa said MonDay might consider more emphasis on staff teaching.
The model MonDay uses now “is one in which offenders play a critical role in the programming and in checking each other’s behavior,” Latessa said.
Another approach “relies more on professional staff to be responsible to teach inmates new skills and ways to behave.”
But, digging deeply into the figures, MonDay Executive Director Tim DePew sees another pattern. When MonDay program completers are compared to a group on probation, those who were assessed as the riskiest offenders beat the averages. In that comparison, MonDay high-risk types were 15 percent less likely to be incarcerated. What that could mean, said MonDay Clinical Manager Michael Flannery, is lower-risk offenders are dragging down averages. Low-risk people can be those with a stable, married family life.
In one theory, those at lower risk aren’t helped by being placed in a months-long residential program away from families. They could benefit more with a different approach, DePew said.
“We embrace the research coming from UC and will be looking forward to working with the state to make adjustments to improve the program,” DePew said.
Another state-funded program here, nonprofit Nova House, will lose funding June 30 because ODRC isn’t happy with how its people did, either. But Nova, which only hosted seven beds for the ODRC, has many other revenue sources. It’s discontinuing the state program and moving forward on other fronts, said Saundra Jenkins, chief executive officer.
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