EDITOR’S NOTE — This is the second of a two-part series on the STAR Community Justice Center in Franklin Furnace.

The three women sit side-by-side, fidgeting nervously with folded hands beneath the table, dressed in monotone smocks that look like medical scrubs.

Around them an underwater scene plays out on the walls. SpongeBob swims with fish while a red scuba-diver reaches for coral. Bright blue water, floor to ceiling, contrasts with the sterile tile of this newly painted room, where inmates at the STAR Community Justice Center in Franklin Furnace can visit with their family and children.

All three of these women are mothers, sentenced to this Scioto County rehabilitation center for felony drug offenses. All have been arrested multiple times, served time in county jails and are here seeking treatment for their addictions. But not one has ever seen this room before, let alone with her family.

“This is really nice,” says one woman, craning her neck to survey the painting and the toys scattered on the ground. “My son loves SpongeBob.”

STAR is described by staff and administrators as a “prison diversion program,” where judges from nine southern-Ohio counties can send non-violent offenders to get treatment for addiction. While they are here, the inmates, known as residents and referred to only as Mr. or Mrs. by their supervisors, can earn their General Educational Development (GED) diploma and attend classes to help them change their criminal thinking.

Since January 2009, 53 Clinton County residents have been sentenced to serve time at STAR, and 11 are enrolled now. After interviews with four different Clinton County STAR residents, a picture of the program as an individualized, community-oriented treatment facility begins to emerge. For most participants, the program works — offenders leave with a new lease on life. For others, STAR is just a roadblock on the path to re-offending. But most of the time, research shows, what determines that difference is the person, not the program.

A Life Inside

A normal day at STAR begins at 5:30 a.m. Residents rise, eat breakfast and exercise before their 8:15 classes begin. They break for lunch around 12 p.m. and are back in class until 3:15 p.m.

“We design these classes to address their criminal thinking, to get them thinking about what brought them here,” said Nicole Johnson, a treatment specialist who works with high-risk offenders.

Johnson said the residents are assigned specific classes depending on their backgrounds. There are classes on parenting and relationship issues. There are seminars on how to break ties with the people who encourage criminal behavior, and classes on reaching out to your family. Every night, residents gather for an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, where senior residents mediate and guide the discussion for the newer offenders.

One of the most popular classes, Johnson said, is Thinking for a Change, a class which aims to highlight such criminal thinking and “re-wire” the decision making that leads to committing a crime.

“[Thinking for a Change] is the best part of my day,” said Nicole Osborne, a 29-year-old Hillsboro native. “Whenever I talk to my family, I can see that their thinking hasn’t changed, and mine has. I’ve noticed the change in myself, and that’s what I like. That’s why I’m here.”

Osborne was arrested in March of 2009 for possession of heroin, and again in April for the same charge. She was indicted in October, sent to county jail in November and was out again by December.

“When I got out [of jail], I got hooked on heroin again,” she said. “That’s when I decided to come here, to get treatment. Thankfully, my probation officer set it up for me.”

Because the program accepts both male and female residents, the two groups are kept in strict isolation from each other: they have separate classrooms, separate bathrooms and individual common areas. The only space they share is the cafeteria, but their meals are scheduled so that they never interact or even see each other.

“It gets harder in the summer, when the male residents help out around the facility outside,” Johnson said. “The females will sneak glances out the window. It’s up to us to correct that thinking.”

“Where the change happens.”

The four layers of the STAR philosophy — Structure, Therapy, Advocacy and Restoration — comprise more than just a convenient acronym. The residents here begin in the first phase — Structure — and work their way up to Restoration, phase by phase, in 180 days or less.

To visualize this process, each phase is assigned its own color. The residents within each phase wear that specific color until they “phase up,” or move on to the next stage of STAR.

The color for Structure, for example, is yellow, and the majority of STAR’s residents don bright yellow smocks for their daily uniform. In this phase, “residents are learning the ropes, learning the handbook, learning the foundation of what this place is,” Johnson said.

Each incoming offender is paired with a peer-mentor to help them socialize into the community. Once they feel comfortable, they submit a request to “phase up” to Therapy, which Johnson calls the “meat and potatoes of the program.”

Residents in this phase wear blue uniforms and spend most of their days in classes, in therapy groups and in role-playing scenarios which test their decision making. The Therapy aspect of STAR is — not surprisingly — the longest and most intensive period of an offender’s time inside.

“This is really where the change happens,” said Eddie Philabaun, the 32-year-old executive director of STAR. A Wilmington College graduate, Philabaun started at the facility as a counselor in 2001, the year it opened, and eventually worked his way to director.

“The therapy stage is the most important. We base everything off of [the resident’s] individualized need. We have classes to address every aspect of their life,” Philabaun said.

After therapy comes Advocacy, the green colored phase which helps prepare residents for the transition back into their normal lives. During Advocacy, residents participate in community service projects and become mentors for incoming offenders. For the first time, they are allowed to leave the facility on “furlough” — an eight-to-72-hour period spent with family members, away from supervision and on their own.

When she sat down to talk, 22-year-old Amber Theademan of Wilmington was two hours away from her first furlough. She hadn’t seen her 3-year-old son Jayden in almost six months.

“I am so excited. The first thing we’re going to do is play until he’s so exhausted,” she said.

Theademan was arrested for the first time in 2008 for two counts of aggravated possession of heroin. Six weeks before she was to finish her treatment and probation term, she was arrested again on a paraphernalia charge. The judge in her case agreed to sentence Theademan to STAR, so she could continue her addiction treatment.

“When that happened, I lost a lot of respect from my family. I was this close to getting my son back. I was clean and sober and made a stupid mistake,” she said.

On this day in June, her grandparents were making the three-hour drive to Franklin Furnace to pick her up for her furlough.

“That’s huge for me,” she said. “When I relapsed, it was like a slap in the face to them. Now they see that I’ve changed and that I’m getting help. My grandma and my mom both said they’re proud of me. I’m not used to hearing that.”

Residents tend to count their time spent at STAR by the day — Osborne, for instance, had been in for 62 days. Theademan, a green-wearing resident in the Advocacy level, 104 days. She is considered a senior resident and is one step away from graduation.

The final phase of STAR — Restoration — is spent soldifying the offender’s transition back into the outside community. Staff members help residents arrange housing and look for jobs. If the offender was a student when he was sentenced — “We all make bad choices sometimes,” Johnson said — then STAR will help make arrangements with schools and universities.

One aspect of Restoration which the residents look forward to the most is the uniform: for the first time in months, they’re allowed to wear street clothes.

Does it Work?

In a 2003 speech to the American Bar Association, Dr. Reginald Wilkinson, then the director of the Ohio Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, summed up the body of research on community based correctional facilities in one sentence.

“Overall, CBCFs are slightly more effective than prison, but substantially more effective with moderate to high-risk offenders,” Wilkinson said.

A 2006 University of Cincinnati study said the same. In it, the recidivism rate for graduates of the STAR program was about 32 percent. Felony offenders sent to Ohio prisons, by contrast, had a rate of more than 50 percent.

“I think there’s a huge benefit to prison,” Philabaun said. “That’s where you need to send violent people. The difference here is the residents need treatment, not punishment.”

Philabaun and his staff recognize that change doesn’t come easy. Judges do too, and if a STAR graduate slips up and re-offends, there will be a bed waiting for them in Franklin Furnace, Philabaun said.

Ask Tabitha Decamp, a 31-year-old mother of three from Blanchester who first entered the STAR program in September 2009 for burglary and theft of prescription medication. In five months she had earned her GED, became a mentor for incoming offenders and graduated on Feb. 10.

“Three months later I was back again,” she said. “I went around the wrong people and I slipped up once. But that’s all it takes.”

Decamp is a smiley, small-framed woman who says her favorite hobby is “making people smile.” Supervisors said they were suprised when she relapsed, but they welcomed her back the same. Now, she’s on an accelerated program known as the “relapse track,” which helps the offenders pinpoint where and why they relapsed and work to change it.

Before she came back, Decamp’s probation officer gave her an ultimatum: go to prison for eleven months then be completely “off-paper,” or done with probation. Or, she could go back to STAR and spend three years on probation once she graduated. She chose STAR.

“I feel so fortunate to have this second chance. I’m blessed,” she said. “When I relapsed, I really looked down on myself. Especially coming back, all my friends seeing me walk in. But now I don’t look down on myself. I realize that people make mistakes, and at least I’m here now trying to change mine.”