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Pact between sheriff’s office, CCA to end
Education and life skills programs will come to the jail via satellite.
YOUNGSTOWN — The 14-year business relationship between the Mahoning County Sheriff’s Office and the Community Corrections Association will end the last business day of this month.
Since 1994, CCA has provided academic instruction and life skills training for Mahoning County jail inmates. Its offerings have included substance abuse education, anger management, domestic violence prevention, parenting classes and remedial classroom driving instruction to get driver’s licenses reinstated.
After CCA leaves, the jail will offer the programming for inmates using newly installed satellite reception equipment and software, said Alki Santamas, director of jail services in the sheriff’s office.
In a May 2 letter to the Mahoning County commissioners and county Administrator George J. Tablack, Richard J. Billak announced his agency would terminate its $110,000-a-year contact with the county May 30.
Billak said the decision stems from the resignation of Pamela Miles, CCA’s jail services director, effective May 28, because of what Billak called the “tenuous” nature of the association’s jail contract and Sheriff Randall A. Wellington’s requests to terminate it.
Under these circumstances, Billak said CCA is “not in a position to recruit and replace her position.” Miles has been with the association for 14 years and served as its jail services director for the past 10 years.
Although he said he had no complaints about the quality of CCA services, Wellington complained in a news conference last October about the cost of the association’s services and asked the county commissioners to fire the association.
The remaining two CCA staff members assigned to the jail program are exhausting their accrued vacation this month, and the association hopes to absorb them into its other programs as vacancies occur, Billak said.
“We regret the end of this relationship and wish we could have been more well-received and respected by the sheriff,” Billak wrote.
Wellington said he hadn’t seen Billak’s letter of termination until a reporter faxed it to him Wednesday. “I feel really bad about it. I should be the first one he should address,” the sheriff said. The sheriff was not listed on the letter as a recipient.
Santamas said he did not know the cost of installation of new equipment and software at the jail, but he said it was reduced because the jail already had a rooftop satellite dish and cabling for law enforcement instructional TV. He said the annual cost of the satellite programming for inmates will be $1,195.
In its manual, the Bureau of Adult Detention — the division of the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Corrections that oversees city and county jails — recommends the satellite approach to jail instruction and life skills programming, Santamas said. The programming received via satellite can be put on TV sets in day use areas or in classrooms in each of the jail’s inmate housing units or recorded for later use, Santamas said.
“We have to have it available for them, but it’s strictly voluntary for them to be enrolled in it,” he said of instructional and life skills programming.
Billak said CCA’s jail programs always use live instructors or facilitators, with audio visual materials as ancillary resources. He added that CCA has helped nearly 400 Mahoning County jail inmates receive their high school General Equivalency Diplomas since 1994. Nine of 10 Mahoning County jail inmates who took the GED test last week passed, he added.
“If you have a group of inmates sitting down in front of a TV, how do you differentiate what you’re teaching when one inmate reads at the fifth-grade level and the inmate next to him reads at a 10th- grade level?” Billak asked.
As for anger management programs, Billak, a licensed psychologist, said: “I see no way you can provide those types of programs without a professional facilitator.”
The Hamilton County jail in Cincinnati used satellite programming together with live instructors and facilitators, but later discontinued the satellite feed because officials there felt it was ineffective, Billak said.
After satellite programming replaces CCA, Santamas said the jail will use live instructors from the state’s Adult Basic Literacy Education program for academic instruction and a live instructor from One Stop to teach job readiness; and it will expand the use of volunteers for Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous groups.
“This opportunity is going to allow us to expand our services and to save a substantial amount of money for the taxpayers,” said Maj. James Lewandowski.
Tablack and Commissioners Anthony T. Traficanti and John A. McNally IV declined to comment on Billak’s letter at a county commissioners’ meeting Tuesday.