By Kristy Deer | Daily Reporter
HANCOCK COUNTY — On many mornings over the past 18 months, Connor A. Kelly left Hancock County Community Corrections and went to his job as part of an arrangement that allowed him to participate in the county’s work-release program.
Kelly, convicted of a high-level felony for drug crimes, was working off part of a 10-year sentence while contributing to society and earning money. Some of that income he turned over to the county to offset the cost of his incarceration.
But Monday, his sentence was changed. He will now finish out his term on home detention. The reason: The county’s work-release program, in place since the late 1990s, is closing indefinitely.
“The reason we’re doing it is pretty cut and dried,” said Pat Powers, the longtime director of Hancock County Community Corrections. “We don’t have the money to fund it anymore.”
The pandemic is a big factor. Authorities decided in March to stop some 80 work-release inmates from coming and going to the community corrections center, 233 E. Main St.
“We couldn’t risk having them go out and coming back in and infecting a whole facility,” Sheriff Brad Burkhart said. “The decision was made to basically not let them go to work anymore.”
Since inmates could no longer go out and work over fears of transmitting COVID-19, administrators could no longer charge them a fee to participate in the program. Prisoners paid a rate of $10 to $20 per week, based on their income, to stay at the facility, with the average being $14 per week. Those fees make up some 75% of the work-release program’s budget.
Collections were down 75% in April, and Powers estimates a loss of $350,000 by year’s end.
Late last week, Powers had to inform 15 county employees who help run the program, including eight full-time workers, they would be losing their jobs.
“That was extremely difficult,” Powers said.
The Hancock County Commissioners voted to back the layoffs at its meeting on Tuesday, May 12. The recommendation will have to be adopted by the county council and community corrections board as well before receiving final approval from the commissioners next week. Both bodies are meeting this week.
Home detention will be a more affordable option, Powers said: It “more than paid for itself” before the work-release program was established.
The 32 inmates who are still enrolled in the program as of this week will transition either to home detention or to the jail, depending on their crime and punishment recommendations. Some who are nearing the end of their sentences this month or next will more than likely be given outright release.
The end of the work-release program, which is expected within the next 30 to 60 days, presents an opportunity for officials to apprise the jail setup now that state stay-at-home restrictions are being eased and arrests are starting to rise. County courts are set to become fully operational again on Monday, May 18.
Burkhart wants to repurpose the community corrections work-release area — which has 102 beds — as new housing for current jail inmates. He’d like to then enlarge the quarantine area at the adjacent jail to phase in new inmates.
Currently, the county jail is operating with only one quarantine block, creating a necessity for more holding cells for new inmates who must be medically cleared before being moved to the general population.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends anyone coming into a jail or prison facility must be quarantined for 14 days. No COVID-19 infections have been reported at the jail.
“The inmates are the responsibility of the sheriff, and I also have a responsibility to my staff,” Burkhart said. “If this is what has to be done, then this is what has to be done.”
At the commissioners’ meeting, Burkhart said he believed many inmates at the jail would likely get sick without a rigorous quarantine. The facility only has eight spaces that can effectively be used to quarantine inmates, he said; most spaces are communal, and cells with barred doors can’t be used to isolate anyone effectively.
Burkhart said he has not received guidance from the state on how to handle the issue; while the state’s reopening plan includes steps businesses are required take to protect employees and customers, it does not lay out a similar pathway for jails. Though Marion County has seen a high number of COVID-19 infections in its jails, Burkhart said most of the sheriffs he has spoken with have reported none. Still, he said, most counties have shut down their work-release programs.
The Hancock County Council already had approved hiring new jailers in either August or September so they could be trained by the time the new jail under construction east of Greenfield opens in 2021. The sheriff’s department also hoped to hire 10 more jail officers in 2021.
The county commissioners recommended Tuesday that seven of eight planned jailer positions instead be filled in June. They would then staff the new jail space. They also recommended the council authorize up to $100,000 to be spent on renovating the space — a project Burkhart hopes can be turned around quickly, possibly in as little as 30 days.
“There is a chain of events that has to take place for all of this to happen,” Burkhart said.
Powers noted any of his staff who’ve been let go due to the funding issues would get an opportunity to apply for the new jailer positions.
Once the new jail is open and operational, Powers, who is set to retire at the end of June, noted county officials can revisit the work-release program and determine if they want to restart it once again.
Burkhart, however, isn’t sure the program will ever come back.
“It’s all kind of up in the air right now,” Burkhart said. “This is all new territory for all of us.”
Noting that drug addiction has made it harder to run the work-release program than when it started 20 years ago, Burkhart reiterated his hope that recovery programs will be a big part of programming at the new jail.
In the meantime, inmates like Kelly now will be sent home to finish their sentences. Deputy prosecutor David Thornburg, who handled the Kelly case, said defendants like him can’t in essence be re-sentenced to harsher terms by sending them to jail.
“As such, home detention through community corrections is the closest form of restriction that I have available to me under the imposed sentence,” Thornburg said of the modification for Kelly, which was approved by Judge Scott Sirk in Hancock County Circuit Court.
Sirk said at the commissioners’ meeting that many inmates who are close to finishing their sentences or were sentenced for non-violent crimes will likely be eligible for home detention to keep the jail’s population under capacity. However, if judges believe there is a risk an inmate may be violent, they will remain in jail.
“That’s a risk we try to weigh in every case to determine what’s reasonable and what’s not,” Sirk said.
County commissioners discussed whether the laid-off employees could be interviewed for other county positions, but there will not be enough jailer job openings for all of them. Without a definitive end date when they can come back to work, staff have to be classified as laid off rather than furloughed.
“You can’t BS them. They’re laid off, and there’s no guarantee of a job,” Commissioner Marc Huber said.
The commissioners did recommend one measure that might soften the blow for laid-off employees: paying for their health insurance through the COBRA exchange for the first four pay periods after they are let go.
As for whether community corrections would be able to reopen in the future, officials said they hoped that would be the case but admitted there was no way of knowing whether the COVID-19 threat would be sufficiently diminished by the time Hancock County’s new jail opens late next year.
“Everybody’s just guessing right now,” County Commissioner Brad Armstrong said.
Jessica Karins of the Daily Reporter staff contributed to this story.
