“What we’ve been doing is illogical,” said Mohr, adding that inmates’ heroin addictions have been particularly taxing on the prison system and difficult to treat.
“The hope is that we’re going to help people, but we’re also going to reduce recidivism,” Mohr said. “This darn heroin is so intense … once you’re addicted, nothing else compares. It takes an extraordinary measure of treatment to reduce this.”
The increased funding, proposed in Gov. John Kasich’s biennial budget, come as Ohio’s prison population sits at roughly 50,000, despite a decrease in violent crimes. Mohr believes the state might be able to its reduce prison population growth — which is on track to increase by 1,100 inmates by the end of 2017 — if it focuses on treating offenders with drug problems.
Oxford resident Kathy Nickel’s son is one of those drug-addicted inmates who hasn’t gotten treatment during his time at Noble Correctional Institution — and he likely won’t for the next nine years of his sentence.
She fears when her son is released he will struggle with his heroin addiction, which has led him to break the law in the past.
“I’m terrified,” Nickel said. “It frightens me because time away from drugs is not treatment. It seems to me that prison could be a godsend for addicts, if they weren’t just sitting there and letting their addiction smolder.”
Driven by heroin
Mohr said part of the state’s plan involves having inmates who do short stints at some prisons meet with recovery staff before they’re released. Those staff members, who will be employed by Ohio’s Mental Health and Addiction Services agency, will continue to work with inmates once they leave prison.
“The service providers will come in, meet the people before they leave and bring them into the community and give them the exact treatment that was very effective in prison,” Mohr said.
All told, the state’s mental health and addiction agency plans to invest roughly $37 million in new drug treatment programs aimed at helping convicted addicts in the state’s 2016 and 2017 fiscal years.
Meanwhile, the prison agency will spend an extra $58.1 million during that same period on community-based corrections programs that will keep low-level, non-violent offenders out of prison.
The move will allow non-violent offenders to stay in their communities — hopefully remaining employed and near family — and allow more people to get treatment for their drug addiction.
Mohr estimates that 25 percent of the 20,000 inmates that are sent to an Ohio prison each year have no history of violence. Yet, few of those inmates get treatment for the problems that landed them in a cell. Some inmates serve only months-long sentences and are released back to where their trouble started.
“The most highly addicted people that we have the potential of turning around, we weren’t even touching,” Mohr said.
The state also plans to increase the number of halfway houses and community residential programs. Instead of sending a drug felon to prison, a judge can order an inmate to serve time in a treatment center.
In Butler County, judges often order non-violent drug offenders to community-based treatment centers, said Butler County Common Please Judge Noah Powers.
“We’ve got too many people in prison. If you put somebody in, there’s a chance that someone’s going to come out,” Powers said. “When we decide to send someone to prison we really have to make a decision: ‘Is this the worst of the worst?’ ”
Powers said bigger cities, such as the metro areas of Cincinnati and Dayton, already have access to some treatment programs. More rural locations do not. And, still, funding isn’t where it needs to be for judges to send all of the drug offenders who need help to treatment instead of prison.
“It’s certainly much needed,” Powers said of the increase in state-funded drug treatment programs. “Right now, the biggest problem that all of them are facing is the drug problem, the heroin epidemic. It’s a pervasive part of all of the criminal activity; thefts, break-ins — a lot of it’s driven by (heroin).”
On the inside
Treatment is expected to change inside prison walls, too. The state plans to expand the number of therapeutic communities, units that house drug-addicted offenders together so they can receive intense treatment.
The state launched therapeutic communities in two of its prisons and plans to have eight running by the end of 2017.
Recidivism rates in those therapeutic communities average 10.4 percent; the state’s average rate sits at 27 percent.
The Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services plans to add 60 staff members, pending union negotiations, to staff prisons and aid in treatment. Another 120 staff members that currently work on drug recovery programs for prisons will be considered employees of the mental health and addictions agency starting in July, said agency director Tracy Plouck.
In turn, the DRC wants to add an additional 150 staffers, mostly corrections officers, to the payroll.
Mohr said he also wants staff to get families involved in treatment plans when inmates come to prison.
“One of our failures, I think, is that we’ve not engaged the families enough in the treatment plan,” Mohr said. “They should have a fundamental understanding of the kind of things they can do to help and support and continue the recovery process, and avoid enabling.”
‘This is a start’
Drug treatment can help prevent inmates from committing future crimes, but prisons also need to work on improving other therapy and programs, said Ed Latessa, director for the School of Criminal Justice at the University of Cincinnati.
Latessa currently is working on a study of the state’s prison programs.
“This is a start, but it’s going to take a lot more than just one program or one facility,” Latessa said of the state’s plan to increase drug treatment. “Ohio tends to have a lot of programming for inmates, but it’s very difficult when you have 50,000 of them to keep them all engaged. Idleness is almost always a problem at every institution.”
Nickel, the mother of the 19-year-old doing time, hopes the system changes so men and women who go in criminals can come out to be productive members of their communities.
“To think about a 19-year-old serving nine years — good God,” Nickel said. “Every time I think about him being released after nine years, I think he went in a boy and he comes out a man with no skills, no normal maturation, poor job prospects, not able to get student loans and no drug treatment.
“It ends up that many, many of the inmates are released without any treatment at all.”
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