Salt Lake City is rapidly striding towards the opening ceremonies of the 2001 Winter Olympics. The freeway system is being totally revamped. The airport has been expanded and entire sports arenas have been constructed for hockey and other indoor winter sports. Construction cranes have sprouted around the entire perimeter of the city and the new overpasses are embossed with cement frescoes of the Olympic symbol of the five intertwined rings. The snow covered peaks were spectacular to the east and the sky was powder blue on the day we touched down for a tour of several of their residential Correction facilities.

Our group was comprised of two architects, the director of parole and probation, the head of public works and myself. Our mission was to tour physical institutions that most closely match the Community Justice Transition Center (CJTC) that we will soon be building in Newport, Oregon and to see if we could learn from the wear and tear on their buildings which mistakes we could avoid in the concept and design of ours.

The Newport CJTC will be a non-custody 30 bed unit surrounded by four classrooms and an administrative area. The idea is for it to work partially as a ‘Sanctioning Center’ similar to the federal model, partially as a transition center similar to the old half-way houses, and partially as a training center for cognitive-behavioral classes for the entire adult offender population in Lincoln County, Oregon.

Our tour guide was Ms. Jennifer Bartell, deputy director of the Utah Department of Corrections. She had arranged for us to have access to two facilities. One housed sex offenders and the other housed the unlikely combination of female offenders and mentally ill male offenders.

Jennifer was young, bright, and knowledgeable. Her 20 years of experience in the corrections system had included work within these types of half-way houses. Her first caution was to refer to these facilities as ‘Correctional Centers’. Utah had learned early that all facilities needed to be multi-functional and that the term ‘half-way’ always connoted potential parolees from the State Prison system. In this day and age, Corrections needs to remain as flexible as possible in terms of the types of services and sanctions that can be offered.  

The first stop was the Fremont Community Correctional Center. The sex offenders housed at this 60 bed facility also worked at various jobs within  the local community and returned to the facility each evening. They received most of their therapy on-site. The therapy was delivered by contract services in the greater Salt Lake area. The rear of the facility was surrounded by razor ribbon and the security staff was in uniform. The security area held high tech computers and a sophisticated camera monitoring system. The offenders that were unemployed congregated in the carpeted day room where there were a few games and a television set. The offenders also had access to the grassy back yard area where there was a picnic table and a smoking area.

The living quarters each held two offenders. There were built in the standard early-dormitory design and were clean and well ordered. The offenders were limited to a small radio, clothing, and personal items. Meals were prepared and served on-site from an industrial kitchen leading into a linoleum floored dining area. There was a classroom area and it appeared that the dining area also served as overflow classroom space.  

The second stop was the Orange Street Community Correctional Center. It was here that we met Ms. Deborah Davidson, the director of the Center and easily the funniest female within 100 square miles. Deborah combined a thoroughly professional grasp of modern correctional theory and practice with a wicked sense of humor about the human condition that had thrown her into a facility that mixed mentally ill offenders with actively criminal females. Those of us that have worked with a female offender population recognize that they bring their own special perceptions to their incarceration. Females have gender-specific games that they play with the staff and each other. The mentally ill male offenders were very passive and mixed easily with the females. They just didn’t ‘get’ most of the games that some females were attempting. Deborah was relentless in relating stories about missed cues, garbled signals, and the bumbling attempts of each population to relate to each other. The highlight apparently came when she organized the Christmas pageant a few years ago and sat in the audience which was filled with therapists, administrators, and correctional personnel. As the male inmate choir sang the traditional Christmas carol that includes the lines ‘Do you see what I see, do you hear what I hear ?’ the lead therapist leaned over to her and slowly muttered “that really is the question, isn’t it?’

In design, the facilities were similar to what we have envisioned. The size and scale were larger because Salt Lake City is much larger than our jurisdiction. Again, the industrial kitchen served meals and most therapy was delivered by contract personnel although one contract person worked on site delivering life skills and cognitive programming. The facility had a centralized security area which was glassed in and had excellent sight lines down the hallways where the offenders lived. The camera monitors were in the security office as well. Administration was located out of the security area just off the public lobby. The facility was clean but the fifteen years of wear and tear showed up in damaged sheetrock, decaying bathroom facilities, and other expected deferred maintenance.

A special mention should be made of the professionalism of the security staff. They have a rough job keeping offenders in and contraband out of this type of facility. As with any facility that allows access into the community there are certain risk factors that will turn anyone’s hair gray at an early age. Unauthorized absences from the Orange Street Correctional Center were considered an escape from incarceration.  The security staff was very professional but we sensed a certain distance between them and the program administration people.

We will only have thirty beds in Oregon as Lincoln County is a rural community with a much smaller offender population base. The programs in Utah were operating at a much more secure level than we are designing for in Newport.  In Newport it will be impossible to escape from our facility because it is not a custody situation. Offenders will have their own address, pay a nominal amount of rent (called a ‘program fee’) and will be responsible for their own meals. There will be one dorm holding eight persons, 2 two bed units, and the rest will be single units. Offenders will ‘earn’ their way to a single unit. Failure to follow Center regulations will result in a probation violation. As mentioned in a previous article for the CCR, all Oregon Probation Officers are authorized to impose jail sanctions of up to thirty days in jail.

Each of the CJTC unit’s will have a microwave but no stove. Each unit will have a small motel-sized refrigerator. The local health department will teach a course titled  “Healthy Microwave Cooking”. All offenders will work, be in class, or be on the Road Crew. All offenders will be on Parole or Probation. No offender will be half-way to a parole or half-way to anything else. This facility is specifically designed to be the last stop before community reintegration. We hope that this community has seen the last of situations where offenders report they are homeless on a Friday night after they are released from jail only to be told to report to the probation office the following Monday to discuss their ‘residential situation’. The damage done over that weekend can undo the effects of any treatment program within those very risky 48 hours.

The only television will be centrally located and will show videos from the facility library that will most definitely not include pro-rape or pro-violence scenes and messages. All units will be wired for Electronic Home Detention. The schedule will be tight, the curfew will be enforced, and the programming will be as invasive as possible.

The lawman inside me recognizes that there will be issues about contraband, violence, and vandalism. However, the facility we are constructing is as close to a community situation as a governmental agency can get. Even the name, Community Justice Transition Facility, is designed to be as inclusive as possible. Our allies in this effort will include, but not be limited to, Children’s Services, Department of Health, Employment Division, and the Community College. Yes the facility will be staffed 24 hours per day, but the participants will pay to reside there. Yes the facility will have areas limited to residents, but the classrooms will be open to the entire community that deals with the issue of offender behavior. Yes there will be issues revolving around drugs and aggression. That is what brought most of these people to our attention in the first place. But we will have a police substation located on-site to provide closer community policing in the local community. Yes the offenders will walk away. That will simply be a violation of parole or probation and a warrant will be issued. When we designed this facility we wanted the next logical step in the continuum of our services and sanctions to be the offender’s own residence. This proposed residence will be investigated and a plan drawn up in conjunction with the people with whom the offender plans to live. If they are active drug users, the plan will be rejected. This is not new operating procedure for most Probation Offices. However, we will have the luxury of a fallback position with alternative offender residences at our Community Justice Transition Facility. Classrooms will be open to these ‘significant others’ so they can attend programs with the offender so we can see if the offender is bullying or manipulating the proposed roommate and also  to educate interested family members in how the offender will have to behave in order to successfully complete the term of his or her supervision..  We are naming this facility a Community TRANSITION center because the arrival of an offender into a domestic situation most assuredly causes a ‘transition’ for everyone. Of all the input received from the community, the demand for family related services, parenting, anger, relationships, co-dependency, and living with a substance abusing partner have been the most overwhelming requests for service.

But the Newport CJTC will be more than a halfway ‘out’ program. It will also serve as a halfway ‘in’ program. That is, offenders with certain violations may be housed at this unit for 30 days or so until the victim can relocate, or for 6 weeks or so until the  residential treatment bed opens up, or for a few weeks until the medication has stabilized the psychiatric condition, or to serve a 60 day sanction so that the offender can maintain his employment even though he relapsed and violated his probation. The center will be fully equipped for drug and alcohol testing and a strict curfew will be maintained. It will have every room wired for electronic home detention devices. Serious violations will simply result in the on-site probation officer taking the offender into custody or requesting a warrant if the offender absconds from this ‘residence’. But mostly this center will be about delivering services in one place, at one time, to a very active, very mobile, mandated, offender population. And it is this opportunity that has our community excited.

For example, the local Health Department thinks that this population has a higher than average incidence of hepatitis, tuberculosis, and sexually transmitted diseases. They are planning to offer health education and treatment /  referral services. The community college wants to initiate a literacy program. The Children Services Department wants to present parenting classes. Our own department will intensify the cognitive work we have been doing for the past 6 years. Adult and Family services will screen for eligibility for the Oregon Health Plan and food stamps.  Centro de Ayuda has agreed to host a Spanish AA meeting on-site. The Domestic Violence program will be   offering batterers intervention and education classes. Many of the private A&D programs will offer education and orientation about their community based programs. The CJTC is specifically designed not to compete with any programming. In fact, we suspect that there are already plenty of services in our community but they are poorly integrated and invisible to the Probation Department and our offenders because we have not had a central location to introduce these services to staff and offender alike.

In fact, as we have given presentations within the local community it has been nothing less than amazing at the response the Probation Department has received. Even faith-based services have inquired as to programming being planned for the weekends. The local arts council wants to involve the children of these offenders in their programming in an effort to reintegrate these families into the community. Some of these families are extremely isolated and have associations solely with other offenders and / or substance abusers. In trying to broaden the team working with offenders and their families toward  reintegration into the pro-social community we are starting to wonder if 4 classrooms will be enough to serve the 30 residents and the 600 offenders and their families.

Our trip to Utah was a valuable example of one professional organization helping another. Times are changing rapidly and the models we are using in Oregon mirror those being used in Utah. That is, we expect total personal accountability, we expect strict compliance with the conditions of supervision, sanctions will be swift and fair, and our mission ‘to improve the health and safety of our community’, may yet be realized  

As the wife of one offender said during a presentation about the CJTC, “I was wondering when the Community part of Community Corrections would finally surface.”

The Lincoln County CJTC is scheduled to open in November, 2002  Carl Reddick is the recipient of the Officer  of the Year Award from the American Parole and Probation Association and the George Tooley Award from the Oregon Criminal Justice Association. He is a nationally known  speaker and trainer. He can be reached at 541-265-8851 #16