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October 27, 2000 Community-based corrections Stephanie
Mutert CBC is made up of about 1,000 employees and community volunteers. Jeanette Bucklew, deputy director of west Iowa operations for the Department of Corrections, says 77 percent of adults in the Iowa correctional system are under community supervision. "The purpose of the program is to successfully work with offenders at the pre-institutional or post-institutional level. We teach them to be productive citizens in our community. We also work in terms of public safety, restitution, community service, meeting with parole officers and with the courts in that area," Bucklew said. As a part of the Department of Corrections, CBC's primary focus is the well-being of the offenders. CBC aims to pull the community together in bettering the lives of those who have hit rough spots in their lives, Bucklew said. "Our mission is to enforce community safety and rehabilitation while promoting law abiding behavior through supervision, education and community in an innovative and cost-effective behavior," Bucklew said. The CBC was established in the 1970s, Bucklew said. During that time, Iowa was working to find a solution to rehabilitate offenders in ways that would involve all aspects of the state. One of these solutions was the heavy involvement of the community; thus CBC was established. "The community was not willing to be a part of what we were proposing to help those offenders. The public in the 1970s was not convictive about our keeping it at the community level through local government. Since then, the community has been an integral part of this program...We help the communities plan, develop budgets and monitor that they are using the guidelines of the program. Other than that, it is the responsibility of the community," Bucklew said. The core of the program is not just the community but also the many volunteers the program relies on to advance its focus. Eight districts across the state cannot be overseen and controlled every day by the CBC out of Des Moines, Bucklew said. Therefore, the eight branches have CBC employees and those branches rely on community support and volunteers. "Without our volunteers, we would not have enough capacity to provide the resources and support for offenders, and offender families who are trying to work for a better life. Without volunteers to help these people, it would diminish our capacity to significantly enhance by volunteers who provide an array of mentoring on impact issues, and who provide liaison and connections into resources," Bucklew said. The CBC provides many different aspects to aid in the rehabilitation of offenders. Some of these aspects are trial services, community service sentencing, parole services and work release in residential institutions, according to the CBC Web site. Offenders completed 302,142 hours of community service in Iowa during 1999. With all of these aspects, the community is at the core, said Sandra Boyd, volunteer coordinator for the 5th Judicial District of the CBC. The 5th District has used offenders to remodel a farmhouse for Heartland Rural Conservation and Development. The building was built into offices with handicap access. They have also worked in Iowa's state parks building fences, cleaning up the nature areas and painting recreational buildings, Bucklew said. "The dedication of the community is amazing. They want to help people that have gotten off the right track, and they honestly want to help them to get back to where they have goals for themselves. We have several different areas that we assign to our volunteers, but all of them work with the offenders and serve as good examples. It is good to see the communities reaching out to people that haven't always lived what we would term a normal life," Boyd said. One of the areas Boyd oversees is the work crew for her district. The offenders have been put into teams to work on city streets and city parks, Bucklew said. They have worked to roof buildings, cut storm damaged trees and to clean the streets. "There is community service work crews ... do the much needed amount of work across our community to get things done that otherwise would not get done. Locally they don't have the funds to do the work, and help them by providing the people to help. A number of programs across the state are used as a sort of restitution back to the community, due to the harm that was done to the community by the offender," Bucklew said. Web Sites: Community-Based Corrections -http://www.state.ia.us/government/doc/CBC.html Department of Corrections - http://www.state.ia.us/government/doc/index.html |