Indiana holds community corrections

INDIANAPOLIS -- Work-release programs aimed at reducing jail overcrowding have become increasingly popular, with more than half of Indiana's 92 counties now part of the community corrections program.\nLast month, Union County became the 65th Indiana county to join the program, and state officials say Clark County may join within months.\nAbout 5,000 Indiana residents are currently out working in the community while on work-release or home detention programs.\nAmong them is Angela Orkmon, a convicted felon serving a three-year sentence for forgery who works at a downtown Indianapolis hotel.\n"Coming out of prison you don't have anything. You're just thrown out there. Now I have something to stand on. That'll make life a little easier when I do get out," said Orkmon, 30, of Marion.\nParticipants in the program must stay off drugs, hold down a job and even pay part of the state's costs for running the program.\nFailure to comply means a return to prison.\nMore counties now realize that community correction is a cost-effective, efficient way to deal with nonviolent offenders, said Tracy Regnier, head of community corrections in Tipton County.\n"It allows them to maintain employment, support their dependents and still pay their debt to society," Regnier, president of a statewide organization of counties with community corrections, told the Indianapolis Star for Saturday's paper.\nThe growth is evident in the amount spent on community corrections. In 1992, only about 20 counties participated, and the program's budget was about $5 million.\nIn the fiscal year that ended June 30, the Department of Correction handed out $21 million in community corrections grants from its $566 million budget.\nIndiana adopted the voluntary community corrections program in the early 1980s. The Department of Correction pays for it by giving grants to counties that agree to keep nonviolent offenders and put them in work-release or home detention.\nThe cost of the grants pales in comparison to the huge sums it takes to build and operate new prisons.\nThe state spent $150 million to build the Miami Correctional Facility, which was completed last year and houses about 1,400 inmates.\nKeeping the prisons running also is quite costly -- an average of $59 a day per prisoner to keep the 21,500 adults held in Indiana.\nIn comparison, DOC officials estimate it costs an average of $26.63 a day to keep someone in a residential work-release program.\nThe statewide average for home detention is $7.97 a day.\n"Why pay the exorbitant cost of incarceration for years or months when the results aren't that much different?" said William Barton, a sociology professor at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis.\nIndiana is among about 15 states that actively support community corrections on the statewide level, said Ed Latessa, head of the criminal justice department at the University of Cincinnati.