WILMINGTON — Saying it would be the first staff increase in his 16 years on the felony court’s bench, Clinton County Common Pleas Judge John W. “Tim” Rudduck told county commissioners Wednesday that an additional full-time person is needed for Adult Probation.
Not only has the Common Pleas caseload gone “way up” since he took office in 2001, the Adult Probation Department has become a more integral part of the criminal justice system, said Rudduck. That’s because “more and more and more people have been, and are going to be, placed on local supervision,” the judge explained.
Although it’s not law currently, Rudduck said he thinks in the future it will not be permissible to send someone to state prison when he or she receives a 12-months or less sentence of incarceration. Instead, the defendant will serve time in the local jail, and that local incarceration will get paid for through the state’s cost savings being directed to the local community.
Whether short-term local incarceration is what the future has in store or not, a pilot project in Clinton County is soon going to increase supervision responsibilities among the Clinton County Adult Probation staff.
As reported in late September, the county was the first in the state to be awarded a $199,000 Targeting Community Alternatives to Prison (T-CAP) grant from the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation & Correction. The T-CAP grant dollars are intended to assist communities in managing the lowest level of felony offenders through more effective and less costly alternatives to prison.
For his part, Rudduck plans to use the T-CAP funds in ways that help non-violent, non-sex offense, fifth-degree felony defendants recover locally from drug addiction, rather than sending people addicted to drugs to a state prison environment.
And even apart from the pilot project, Rudduck said he’s “not huge on sending low-level [felony], nonviolent, non-sex offense people to prison, unless I’ve completely given up — that I can’t work with these people, can’t trust them.”
Moreover, the frequency of drug testing has gone up a lot since Rudduck’s first few years as the felony court judge, and drug testing can take up chunks of time for probation officers.
In connection with the local heroin and opiate epidemic, there is a new drug-testing protocol locally whereby many people on supervision are required to call daily to learn whether they have to have a drug test that day. The protocol has resulted in a lot more drug tests, said Rudduck.
Probation officers often have a work background in law enforcement, said Rudduck. The judge estimated the annual salary of the new probation officer here would be $35,000 to $40,000. In addition, there would be an expenditure of General Fund dollars toward employee benefits such as medical insurance and the Public Employee Retirement System.
Clinton County Commissioner Kerry Steed, who has been leading the budget meetings with department heads, said he expects the commissioners to hold work sessions in the near future to finalize the county’s General Fund budget.
Reach Gary Huffenberger at 937-556-5768.
