ANDERSON - Madison County courts designed to help people avoid jail by dealing with problems got a nearly $1 million boost. Officials hope it's enough to make sure the specialty courts never need to ask for local tax dollars.
"This is a huge award. The judiciary doesn't get stuff like this very often," Court Administrator Jim Hunter said of a $971,000 stimulus grant the county received in September. "We're trying to build in a sustainability component so taxpayers don't have to pay for it."
That job will fall to a problem-solving court coordinator, whose primary function will be to raise money to support drug court, mental health court and re-entry court. That person will be one of seven-and-a-half new positions funded through the grant. The county also will hire an assistant coordinator, two-and-a-half case managers, two adult probation officers and a court reporter.
"It's really good news to get information that we'll be able to add people and there won't be any county funds spent," Hunter said.
Drug court has been a fixture in the county for about the past decade, but mental health court has been around for only a couple of years, and re-entry court less time than that.
Drug and mental-health courts receive cases mostly referred by judges. Keeping people out of jail where possible helps more than by just saving tax dollars.
"The idea of all problem-solving courts is you save taxpayer money because you don't incarcerate people and you use the power of the judiciary to monitor people," Hunter said. The grant will allow the courts to be coordinated so that case managers and probation officers will be cross-trained to work in any court.
Randall Shepard, chief justice of the Indiana Supreme Court, praised "a remarkable achievement" in securing such a significant grant. He said the grant puts Madison County in the forefront of communities in consolidating problem-solving courts.
"This is really good news for the community," Shepard said. "The prosecutor's office and the public defender and people engaged in treatment and mental health, for instance, will have a much stronger ability to try to create more opportunities for rehabilitation.
"It'll create, frankly, a healthier, safer community than would have been possible otherwise," he said.
Superior Court 1 Judge Dennis Carroll, who is also chief judge of Madison County Unified Courts, said "local trial courts just don't get big grants like this.
"It's a perfect kind of grant to have when you're in kind of a depressed economic environment," he said. The county gets the funding up front, and, "In this case, there's no local match."
The money will allow the county better options when dealing with nonviolent or first-time offenders.
Treatment is a key in drug court and mental health court.
"The goal of problem-solving courts is to take people who have a criminal case but can be managed in the community if we have adequate resources," Carroll said. "The key word there is 'adequate resources' there to monitor them. ... This big grant we got will add significantly to the support staff, the people we need to do that."
Those resources will also help ensure public safety, because those who fail to live by terms arranged through the problem-solving court will face arrest.
"Part of the design of the grant is to help us coordinate the different problem-solving courts," Carroll said. "We all have clients or issues in common."
Madison County's grant and approach to consolidating problem-solving courts is getting noticed. "There are some people out there who are very interested in this umbrella concept," Hunter said.
Among them, the New York-based Center for Court Innovation, which is consulting with the county as part of the grant. That group collects data on specialty courts around the country and also helps them develop best practices to keep them self-sustaining.
Carroll said it will be important for the courts to collect evidence of success to ensure funding streams in the future.
Hunter said there are some markers of success already. Those in drug court have an employment rate of more than 95 percent, he said. "Those are all people that are working and are with their families instead of being incarcerated someplace where the public is paying for them."
Hunter, director of adult probation Wayne Schaffter, and Katherine Holtzleiter, chief juvenile probation officer, were instrumental in writing the grant.
"We have every reason to try to centralize things," Schaffter said.