GREENFIELD — Hancock County Community Corrections plans to double its space for women to keep up with the growing number of incarcerated females in the county.
The work release center, 233 E. Main St. in downtown Greenfield, has 12 beds available for women who are eligible for community corrections, said Pat Powers, the work-release center’s executive director. The project will change a male dormitory into a space for women, doubling the number of beds to 24.
R.E. Construction & Maintenance Service, Inc., of New Castle, will complete the project for $15,777, the lowest of three bids the county received for the project. The Hancock County Commissioners recently voted to pay for the project from the board’s cumulative capital development fund.
Crews will knock out two sections of a shared wall between the male dormitory and the current female work release area and install two steel doors. Powers said the steel doors will take about four weeks for the contractor to receive, so he’s hoping for the project to be completed by mid-April. Construction should only last about seven days, he said.
Doubling the number of beds for women and converting some of the space into a larger day room will cause work release to lose 26 male beds, shifting it from 104 beds to 78, Powers said. That won’t hurt programming for men, he added, since those 26 beds are currently empty. The need is greater for women.
“Currently, there’s females that are serving time in jail and in Daviess County that are eligible for work release, but will actually get out of jail before a bed comes available,” Powers said.
More than 20 women are waiting to join the program, he said, split between those incarcerated in the Hancock County Jail and Level 6 offenders the county pays to put in the Daviess County Jail. But doubling the number of beds will only make a dent in those waiting for work release, he said. Several women still won’t be able to join the program, and it’s unclear if the number of incarcerated women will keep rising.
When the community corrections building was designed in the early 2000s, Powers said the layout was based on percentage of men and women in the jail at that time. Since then, the jail population has risen significantly, leading to overcrowding, and the number of women has “skyrocketed,” he said.
Keith Oliver, the county’s jail commander, said 48 women were in the jail on Thursday and 10 others were being held in Daviess County. In 2006, he remembers six female inmates in the facility.
According to a report last May by the Sentencing Project, a national organization promoting criminal justice reform, the number of women in jails and prisons in the United States increased by more than 700 percent from 1980 to 2016. About a million women were also on probation or parole in 2016.
Oliver and Powers said substance abuse is the No. 1 issue causing the higher incarceration rate among women in the county. A decade ago, Powers said it was more common for women to get arrested for driving drunk or shoplifting. That’s shifted to more severe charges, such as dealing drugs and assisting in crimes. Oliver said some women arrested for opioid use also have cases with the Indiana Department of Child Services.
A former plan to build a new jail downtown would have shifted community corrections and the probation department into the current jail, giving both programs more space. More than 2,000 people are on probation in the county, chief probation officer Josh Sipes has previously told county officials.
Community corrections offers cognitive behavior programs, counseling and mental health services, Powers said. The county partners with The Jane Pauley Community Health Center, Families First and Gallahue Mental Health Services.
