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Funds running out for jail program

Winona Post - 3/21/2018

Prisons and jails are called correctional facilities, but a stint behind bars does not always turn a repeat offender's life around. Winona County CARE Program Coordinator La Green described a common situation her clients face: they get arrested again and have nowhere to live when they get out of jail, except with the same old friends abusing the same old drugs. "Where do you go?" Green asked.

Winona County Sheriff Ron Ganrude put it this way: "When you get out, you have no place to live, you don't have a job, you don't have any money. You're going to wind up right back in jail again."

For the last several years, it has been Green's job to help inmates change that situation. She jokes the mission is akin to saving the world, but the county's efforts have made a difference with some people. "Client B has had a long history with the criminal justice system. He was chemically dependent, unemployed, and had little motivation or means to be rehabilitated," Green wrote in a report on some of the CARE Program's success stories. The report is full of descriptions of people who had zero interest in seeking mental health care or showing up for appointments, and people who police referred to as "frequent flyers." After working with the CARE Program and going through treatment, Client B sobered up, paid for his own apartment, and paid off fines to get his driver's license back and avoid getting more driving-after-revocation charges. "He is currently an active sober advocate in support groups, and pushes his peers to succeed," Green wrote.

When Green meets with inmates, she asks them, if they had a magic wand they could wave and change everything, what would their lives look like? Some want to be rich, to own their own business, or have an attractive girlfriend. Others, Green said, tell her things like this: "'I'd be reconnected with my kids.' 'I'd know where I'm going to sleep.' 'I'd have some help with my mental health.' Basic-needs stuff. That's their big dream for their life." Green continued, "Some of the people I've met with just feel like they have no agency left, no ability to make decisions and that things aren't going to change out there in the world."

"If someone is leaving the facility, and they feel there is no direction they can go in other than what they're used to doing, there's never going to be a change," Winona County Jail Administrator Steve Buswell said. "The diversionary programs, whatever you want to call them, are about giving people that hope and some level of support ? When the baton gets dropped, the end result is they're going to come back to jail because they're going to be doing the exact same thing."

Funding running out

At the same time Winona County is facing the potential multi-million-dollar expense of building a new jail to replace a current facility that is not up to code, county leaders are also facing decisions about whether it is worth spending local tax dollars to keep anti-recidivism and jail-population-reducing programs running. In September, the CARE Program will run out of grant funding. Whether and how the program will continue after that is unclear.

Winona County residents have read this story before. Since 2009, the CARE Program has subsisted on various federal and state grants, and on multiple occasions, it has been at risk of running out of funding and shutting down. Green has described these grants as seed funding, and warned that, sooner or later, the county would have to fund the program itself or shutter it. In the past, county leaders have been unwilling to fully fund it with local tax dollars, but the CARE Program has managed to continue winning new grants to keep itself alive. "The jig is kind of up," Green said at a meeting earlier this month. The state and the federal government are not going to be giving this program any more grants, she explained, "and they want us to think of a way that the program can be sustainable sans the grant." Regardless of what happens, Green said she will leave this job to take another one in the Winona area, but she hopes that some version of the program she helped establish will continue.

"This is something we need, and I would hope we get to keep it," Ganrude said. "If we don't, it'll have an impact on our jail staff, our jail, and our programs."

Could some version of CARE continue?

County officials are discussing different ideas for how the work the CARE Program does could continue in a different format. Perhaps it could be partially absorbed by other county departments or other local organizations. Winona County Administrator Ken Fritz said there may be excess funds in a different grant that could continue some of the services CARE currently provides, but not enough to fund CARE Program staff. Ganrude, Buswell, and Green saw some kind of rearrangement of CARE's work as a workable solution, but with several caveats.

The Winona County Sheriff's Office and jail do not have the staff to absorb this work, and they do not have the funding to supply cash-strapped inmates with bus passes to the temp agency or help cover first month's rent for an apartment, Ganrude said. It is really better to have a civilian - not a detention deputy, police officer, or probation agent - in this role, Buswell stated. "There needs to be a trust factor. If you have a licensed officer or probation agent that just picked you up and brought you to jail, where's the trust factor?" he explained.

In the past, when Winona County has tried to rearrange programs to save money without completely cutting the programs, it has shifted duties onto fewer staff members who also have other responsibilities. Right now, the county has a dedicated case manager and program coordinator - Green - whose sole job is to talk with inmates about what they need to change their lives and help them achieve that change. "There are a lot of things that can be shifted around to other departments ? especially if we're collaborating with community partners," Green said. However, she added, "The best-case scenario, for me, would be to continue and expand the mental health services we've started with [in-jail counseling] and CARE, and have a dedicated case manager and coordinator of services because these folks need an advocate."

Are pre-trial services a higher priority?

Fritz is the county's head budgeteer, and he said it will be up to Ganrude or the Criminal Justice Coordinating Council (CJCC) to make a formal funding request if they want the CARE Program to continue.

However, Fritz said that many criminal justice leaders believe that it might be more valuable to ask the county to invest its limited funds in a different criminal justice reform program: pre-trial services. For over a year, county officials have been talking about launching a pre-trial services program that would, essentially, help more people get out of jail on bond or some other release program while their court case is pending. Fritz said that the CJCC may pick its battles when it comes to asking the County Board for money, and that the CJCC might prioritize asking for funding for this "front-end" incarceration-reducing program over the CARE Program's "back-end" incarceration-reducing program. "I would suspect that [the CJCC], if they want this to go forward, will come up with something," Fritz said of the CARE Program. "But they also have to take into consideration, is this what we want to do? Or do we want something on the front end and that's a higher priority?"

Can the county afford to invest in both programs? Fritz replied, "Well, the county has a deficit. That hasn't gone away." He continued, "I think there's a lot of times a case to be made in doing prevention that in the end will pay off." He added, "There's an argument to be made, but the problem with those is they're very difficult to quantify ? The problem is, in the real world, it's hard to see that impact."

On the other hand, Fritz stated, as the county looks ahead to a potentially very large, long-term investment in a jail facility, investing in criminal justice reforms should be part of the conversation.

Keep reading the Winona Post for more on this story.

Chris@winonapost.com