When Hendricks County resident Drew Beason agreed to sign a drug court plea, he thought it would buy him time to keep using. He had just completed serving time in Marion County for felony theft. A separate felony charge took him to the Hendricks County drug court, where he was sentenced to work release after it was discovered he was still using. He stayed in the work release program for six weeks. For the first three weeks, he could not leave the facility for anything but work.
“I don’t think I would’ve made it had they not done that,” Beason said.
There, he met a counselor from The Willow Center. She visited the facility regularly to conduct group meetings as part of a state program called Recovery Works. After his three-week building restriction was done, Beason began seeing her one-on-one at her office in Brownsburg.
State Rep. Greg Steuerwald, who represents Hendricks County, authored the law that created the program in 2015. The idea for it came when he began work in 2010 on the criminal code reform that was enacted in 2013. He heard the same thing from everyone in the criminal justice system with whom he spoke then. Drug addiction and mental health issues were major drivers of the imprisoned population in Indiana.
“Everybody in the entire criminal justice system was telling me addiction is our No. 1 cause and we have very little in means of services to assist these people,” he said.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, rates of mental illness and substance abuse are significantly higher among the jailed population than the general population. A 2013 study published in Current Psychiatry Reports found that 68% of drug offenders are arrested again within three years of being released.
Beason had been in and out of jail and rehab for most of his adult life. He used opiates for 16 years – since he was 15 years old – before getting sober in the work release program. This month, he will be clean for a year.
Had Beason gone to the Hendricks County Jail instead, he would have entered a jail that was already well above the ideal number of inmates, the number of fixed beds in the facility, and above the maximum number of inmates – 305 – identified by Hendricks County Sheriff Brett Clark twice.
The jail has 250 beds, but it can roll out temporary beds as the need arises. There were more than 250 inmates on average every month in 2016. A Sagamore Institute snapshot from December 2015 also revealed the population was above that figure. Indiana Department of Correction guidelines set the ideal inmate population at 80% of the total number of fixed beds – 200 at the county jail.
Clark said there were several reasons the jail population had been over 250 for so long. The county’s explosive growth in recent years, the rise in opioid abuse, and the criminal code reform that moved low-level felons out of state prisons and into jails were all major factors.
One of the state goals of the Recovery Works program was to reduce recidivism – the number of people released who are rearrested within three years – by 20%. Clark said, in the long run, that may help keep jail populations down. But he has more people in his jail than he would have without low-level felons. On Feb. 22, nearly 16% of the inmates were people who, before the reform, would have been in state prison.
Steuerwald said one aim he had with the bill was to divert people out of jail, in part, to alleviate the burden on local jails that taking on low-level felons would produce. It’s part of a larger shift to restorative justice in the state that includes jail alternatives such as drug court, work release, mental illness and substance abuse treatment and other mechanisms geared toward rehabilitation.
“It doesn’t mean letting people get by with things. It means, maybe, rethinking persons who have addictions, and certainly not to excuse their behavior, but maybe getting them help. If they get help for their addiction, maybe they won’t break the law and end up back in jail,” Clark said.
Beason spent time in jail in Marion County. He described people talking about their glory days using, working up new ways to commit crime, exchanging numbers and meeting each other on the outside. More than once, he followed up with people he met in jail.
“It’s like going to school on drugs,” he said.
For years, Beason said he was going to quit after he did this or that thing happened. People he would talk to about it believed him at first, but after a while, they started to tune him out. Whether he did this or that thing happened, he kept using.
“There’s a lot of false promises that I’ve given to my family. There’s a lot of hope that’s come and went, come and went so many times,” he said.
While his mom and sister were always on board with him, the men in his family have been slower to believe. Even as he approaches a year of sobriety, to Beason, they seem skeptical.
“I think if I can get my step-dad and my grandpa and my brother’s approval and they finally come back around entirely, I’ll feel complete again as far as part of the family,” Beason said. He hoped his continued work with The Willow Center, and help from Recovery Works, could get him there one day.
Steuerwald is co-author of a bill this year that he described as “a continuation of the program.” The bill would expand Recovery Works eligibility to certain misdemeanor and juvenile offenders if enacted into law.
An architectural firm is conducting a feasibility study on the jail. Clark said he wants to position the next sheriff, whoever it is, to have a clear plan forward with the building, whether the county decides to build a new one or add on to the current one.
Originally published in Hendricks County ICON, 2017. Republished here for archival and portfolio purposes.