Prisons director backs bill on deadbeat parents

The proposal would help ease prison crowding.

COLUMBUS (AP) — Parents who fail to make child-support payments should be sent to halfway houses instead of prison, the state prisons director said.

Terry Collins, director of the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction, said he supports a bill that would keep such parents out of prison because it gives them a chance to get a job and make their support payments.

“It becomes a win-win situation for the children and family members of these offenders when they are able to maintain employment and provide monetary support to the family,” Collins said.

State Rep. Ted Celeste, a suburban Columbus Democrat, proposed the bill Thursday. If passed, judges would be urged to send nonsupport offenders to halfway houses for counseling.

The bill would take a pilot program that started last year in seven counties and spread it statewide.

Celeste said sending nonsupport offenders to halfway houses would cost a lot less than paying to house them in prison. It could also help ease prison crowding.

State prison officials estimate that keeping those who fail to pay child support out of their penitentiaries would save about $13,000 a year per offender and increase support payments by 71 percent.

Those who end up in prison are usually the repeat offenders, after judges decide they’ve had enough, said Linda Janes, a 17-year veteran of the state prison system and deputy director of the Division of Parole and Community Services.

Celeste’s bill doesn’t contain a request for funding to expand the pilot program, which Janes said would cost the prison system about $2 million up front.

But it would save the system up to $16 million a year, based on the average number of nonsupport offenders who could be sent to prison, Janes said.

Of the record 50,633 inmates in Ohio prisons this week, nearly 800 are locked up for failure to pay child support, Janes said. Based on the pilot program, which has diverted 650 people who could have been sent to prison, she estimated that 1,800 to 2,000 could be kept out of prison each year if the program went statewide.

Nonsupport offenders generally serve six- to eight-month prison sentences.

Celeste said he thinks the bill can be passed in the lame-duck session after the November election, possibly as an amendment to a bill the House passed that is designed to help prisoners re-enter society.

Ohio House Speaker Jon Husted, a Republican, declined to comment on the bill because he had not reviewed it, spokeswoman Karen Stivers said.