photo by: Mike Yoder

Douglas County Jail

The leader of the Douglas County Commission says she and her fellow commissioners are already giving thought on how to implement scaled-down versions of programs they viewed on a tour of Johnson County’s correctional facilities.

On Friday, Douglas County Commission Chair Nancy Thellman, commissioners Mike Gaughan and Michelle Derusseau and a number of county staff members toured a 50-bed substance abuse treatment facility and a work release center on the Johnson County Community Corrections campus just east of Gardner. The four buildings in the Community Corrections campus are near the Johnson County Adult Detention Center.

As impressive as the tour was, commissioners needed to consider the differences in population between the two counties, Thellman said. Johnson County has more than five times the population of Douglas County and a much larger budget, she said.

“That was on all of our minds when we talked about it after the tour in the parking lot,” she said. “We’ve said all along we will consider options to reduce our jail population. But how do we transplant what they are accomplishing in Johnson County to a county our size? It’s not simply a cookie-cutter thing. We have a much more limited budget and much smaller population. The number of people on that campus was more than we have in our entire jail.”

Johnson County’s substance abuse program is offered as a last-chance treatment option for offenders who would otherwise spend considerable time in the Adult Detention Center or state prisons, Thellman said. The work release center allows inmates to stay employed in a setting other than jail.

“It was very interesting that there (were) a lot of people coming and going depending on their work schedules,” she said. “They have a very robust transportation component because many of those in work release have lost their driver’s licenses. There are vans coming and going to take people to jobs all over the metro area at all hours.”

Johnson County District Court judges are very selective about which inmates they place in the programs, Thellman said. They are looking for a good fit and inmates who will successfully complete their commitments, she said.

Thellman also said these programs should not be viewed as alternatives to incarceration, as the community corrections inmates remain on probation and stay on the campus.

“The programs are really an enhancement to incarceration rather than alternatives to incarceration,” she said.

Thellman said the challenge would be to identify programs that could be scaled back to work in Douglas County.

An enhanced work-release program based on the Johnson County model, which does not operate out of the jail, would reduce the Douglas County Jail’s population by about a dozen inmates, Thellman said. That would be a good step, but it wouldn’t solve the overcrowding that requires the county to house 60 inmates in the jails of other counties on a daily basis, she said.

Thellman said commissioners would probably talk further about what they learned at the commission’s meeting on Wednesday. She said commissioners might have a work session in the future on how to make some of the programs they viewed on the tour work in Douglas County.