Over 100 clients that served sentences through Marshall County Community Corrections completed them successfully last year.
Community Corrections Director Ward Byers explained the number of closed cases in the annual report to the Advisory Board members on Thursday.
“Those were cases actually closed in 2020,” said Byers. “Some of those may have been layovers from 2019 or 2018 depending on the length of their sentence. However, there were 131 successful completions. Those also considered successful are 71 that were released to the Probation Department. In other words, they had a suspended sentence to finish out. The numbers of successful completions over the number of technical violations, or failures, is much higher. That is always a positive.”
In all, there were 363 electronic monitoring clients and 16 daily reporting clients. The majority of those clients were sentenced on controlled substance offenses. Most of clients are serving Level 6 Felony offenses.
Marshall County Prosecutor Nelson Chipman pointed out that there are some Level 4 and Level 5 clients and even those with more serious convictions in the program. Byers commented that Level 2 and Level 3 Felony clients are typically entering community transition.
“They’re just finishing out their prison sentence with us. They’ve had significant prison time. They’re just eligible so they’re coming back and finishing out with us. Those are generally not sentenced directly out of the courts.”
The board voted unanimously to accept the annual report.
Byers also commented that a lot of rehabilitation programs for clients were suspended due to COVID-19 so it was difficult to meet in-house benchmarks with performance measures. A marriage mentoring program was completely halted due to the health pandemic. The Department of Corrections has made note of the difficulties so that will not be a negative reflection on the report.
