Fulton County officials may consider implementing a substance abuse treatment program for inmates that’s proved successful in neighboring Kosciusko County and elsewhere.
At Tuesday’s meeting of the Fulton County Council, Det. Sgt. Travis Heishman of the Fulton County Sheriff’s Office gave a glowing review of Kosciusko County's Jail Chemical Addiction Program, known as JCAP. Last week, he attended the program’s graduation ceremony.
Heishman explained JCAP is a 4-month program that consists of recovery-based classes and incorporates multiple community organizations contributing to teach a variety of other classes. Participating inmates attend six to eight hours of classes each day and are expected to maintain high standards of living while in the program.
“It’s basically a substance abuse program within the jail on steroids,” Heishman said. “They house the inmates independent from the other inmates. They teach them recovery stuff on top of having community members come in and teach life skills, anger management, consumer math and more.”
The JCAP schedule consists of recovery-based classes covering such things as decision making, anger management, seeking safety, addiction, boundaries, codependency and domestic violence. Life skills also are an important part of recovery and these classes include financial literacy, parenting, logistics, CORE Mechanical’s Introduction to Construction, ServSafe Food Handlers Safety, Be Heart Smart, INWork Job Readiness, art and fitness.
“The ones that graduate in Kosciusko County are CPR-certified, they’ve been through anger management classes, parenting classes, just all kinds of different things on top of the recovery, so it’s definitely getting them ready for integration back out in society,” Heishman said. “They have volunteers coming in from the community all week long for the four-month program.”
The success rate of JCAP is 59 percent – considerably higher than the national average for recovery programs, according to the Kosciusko County Sheriff’s Office.
“From talking with them, the biggest hurdle they had was getting staff behind it and then getting community members to follow,” Heishman said. “They’ve now got the community completely involved in it. Mentors from the community have bought into the program and bought into them as individuals. It’s a super cool program, it really is, and they’ve done a fantastic job over there.”
Council President Phyl Olinger asked how strict the criteria is for inmates wanting to participate in the program.
In addition to meeting certain standards, Heishman noted inmates who apply to the program are screened through a selection committee comprised of representation from Kosciusko County’s probation department, prosecutor’s office, work release center, community corrections, jail staff, jail commander and sheriff.
“It was really neat to see the graduation,” he said, noting all the community members who taught a class were invited, as well as previous graduates of the program.
When asked, Heishman estimated that 90-95 percent of Fulton County inmates can be linked to substance abuse in one way or another.
“That’s the problem. Even if somebody gets arrested for a theft, a burglary or something else, 9 times out of 10 it’s an underlying substance abuse issue,” he said. “Even though it may just look like a burglary or a theft, they stole or broke into a house to feed a habit or an addiction.”
He added that a program like JCAP could greatly benefit Fulton County, which also suffers from a high rate of recidivism – the tendency of a convicted criminal to reoffend.
He said there are a lot of other counties, including Marshall and St. Joseph, that have picked up the program.
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