IRACS Helps Inmates Reenter Society
June 22, 2023 at 12:54 a.m.
IRACS Helps Inmates Reenter Society
By David [email protected]
But it’s going to take the whole community for it to be successful, if the county is selected for the program.
Jayme Whitaker, vice president of forensic service for Mental Health America of Indiana, helped create the IRACS program. He explained how it began and how it worked at a community meeting Wednesday at Palette in Warsaw.
“We’ve been in talks here with the sheriff and other great leaders in the community, and our hope is that we can get the program launched here in this community,” he said.
Whitaker himself has been in long-term recovery. He’s been working the field as a peer for the last 19 years. He spent time incarcerated, having gone to prison at age 15.
“But the great thing is, in my early 30s, I began to realize that life didn’t have to be that way. And I was able to be offered that opportunities because I had the right people in my life who gave me the right opportunities, who believed I could be a totally different person than what I had always been, and stood in the gap for me until I found that person. And then they supported me in figuring out how to give back,” he said.
Once a person is in recovery, how they stay in recovery is they have to find a way to give it back, he said. “It’s really, really important. It’s part of the process.”
He said programs like IRACS are not only essential to help other people who are still struggling and who are “still down in it,” but also to help people who have found their way out to stay out.
While there are many reentry programs across the country, Whitaker said IRACS is very unique and the success they have had over the last three years has been insurmountable.
In fall 2021, Whitaker had been running the IRACS program in the Howard County Jail where it was created to stop people from dying leaving the jail and to do well. Inmates would leave the jail, only to die after they got out.
Working with the sheriff, he said they realized people leave the jail without the resources they need, “people don’t know what they don’t know,” when you’re going to help someone coming out it’s always good to help someone who looks like you that can relate to you and “waiting until someone leaves to start helping is way too late.”
The main mantra they came up with in the IRACS program was “reentry begins at day one.” That means the moment someone gets arrested and brought to jail, reentry starts right then. “We start helping and working toward reentry right then. And as you can imagine, it takes everybody to be on the same page to make that happen,” he said.
Whitaker was approached by Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb’s office to pilot and expand the IRACS program and the state funded them. The funding came from Next Level Recovery, the governor’s office, the Division of Mental Health and Addiction and was collaborated with Mental Health America of Indiana.
There were several components they knew they had to have in order to have a reentry program that was going to be effective and efficient. Whitaker said those components included a sheriff who was willing to do something out of the box, donate jail space and let peers into the jail to work full time 40 hours a week. The peer teams are a part of the sheriff’s teams. Five sheriffs were willing last year to pilot the program.
He said you have to have city and county leaders who are recovery focused and want to see a “recovery ecosystem” grow in their community. Whitaker said it is expensive at $400-$500,000 a year to run an IRACS program. That doesn’t include the community teams.
“It’s a lot of money, but if you build a community, you give people a whole sense of community for recovery,” he said.
The courts, prosecutors, public defenders and community corrections also must buy in the program.
For the pilot sites, five Indiana counties were chosen - Delaware, Scott, Dearborn, Davies and Blackford counties - to learn as much as they could in the pilot year about how the program works.
IRACS has five engagement pathways. Level A is for an inmate who has spent a lot of time in jail. Level B is for an inmate who is getting out in the next 30-90 days. Level C is for a jail inmate going to prison. Level D is for someone who might get arrested on like a Saturday and then bond out or get released by the courts on Monday or Tuesday. The final level, E, is for inmates who claim not to have any problems and refuses service.
“When we first started IRACS, and we launched the five pilot sites, we were at 50-50. Half there wanted help, half of the people there didn’t want help. I can tell you by the sixth-month mark, 92% of the people in the jails were participating in IRACS,” Whitaker said.
He then presented six-month data and one-year data on IRACS.
Between July 1 and Jan. 1, IRACS peers supported 2,004 individuals in the jail. From July 1 to June 1, 2023, they supported over 5,000 people in the five jails, he stated. He said they provided almost 3,500 intake surveys and that was over 8,000 by the end of the grant cycle year. They had 13,788 one-on-one meetings with people in the first six months and over 30,000 for the year. They provided almost 3,000 groups as of Jan. 1, and they’re about 6,500 groups by the end of the year. There were over 1,000 recovery plans by Jan. 1, and pushing over 3,000 recovery plans by the end of the year.
“The first 30 days of reentry are the most dangerous 30 days of someone’s story. Period. Actually, the first 48 hours, the risk of overdosing death or those who IV drug use is like 89%. It’s ridiculous. In the first two weeks, it jumps to 127%, so it’s really, really high,” Whitaker said.
Out of the five sites, the highest success rate - which he said means people staying engaged for the first 30 days - is 86%, with the lowest being 61%. The national average is 29% success rate with reentry.
Whitaker also talked about how the IRACS program has changed jails into almost being like recovery centers and inmates are leading their own recovery meetings in between meetings.
“It’s completely changed the culture inside the jails. Completely changed the culture. I’m not saying it’s perfect because it’s not perfect, but I will tell you it’s been really pretty extraordinary,” he said.
The final year report will be released in the next three weeks.
“The second thing, and this is why we’re here today, is we had so much success with the program last year, the governor’s office decided they’re going to fund the current five sites for another and they’ve given us enough funding to expand to 10 more sites throughout the state,” he said.
Asked specifically where Kosciusko County is in the process, Whitaker said he couldn’t really say what they’re doing until they announce it publicly, with the decision being made Monday.
“But I will tell you ... a community has to meet all the benchmarks. It’s a lot of money, it’s a lot of investment. This program launched like a freight train, so once it goes it goes full board, so you have to have the right pieces in place, and all the pieces have to be there. ... What I also will say is, out of the communities we looked at, and I looked at over 20, there’s only about five that meet all the benchmarks and Kosciusko County is one of those that meets all the benchmarks,” Whitaker said.
Sheriff Jim Smith spoke about how supportive he was of the program, while Prosecuting Attorney’s Office Chief Deputy Dan Hampton said he thought it was a game changer. Prosecutor Brad Voelz pointed out all the community support that was present at Wednesday’s community meeting.
“People think that being in jail is hard and then getting out of jail is the easy part of it. It’s not. It’s the opposite of that, right? Once you’re in the jail for a while that becomes easy. The meals are provided, the bed is provided, your schedule is provided. Everything is provided for you. It’s hard coming out, and that’s what this program addresses,” Voelz said.
Smith also said IRACS will not supplant the Jail Chemical Addiction Program (JCAP), but will run parallel to it.
But it’s going to take the whole community for it to be successful, if the county is selected for the program.
Jayme Whitaker, vice president of forensic service for Mental Health America of Indiana, helped create the IRACS program. He explained how it began and how it worked at a community meeting Wednesday at Palette in Warsaw.
“We’ve been in talks here with the sheriff and other great leaders in the community, and our hope is that we can get the program launched here in this community,” he said.
Whitaker himself has been in long-term recovery. He’s been working the field as a peer for the last 19 years. He spent time incarcerated, having gone to prison at age 15.
“But the great thing is, in my early 30s, I began to realize that life didn’t have to be that way. And I was able to be offered that opportunities because I had the right people in my life who gave me the right opportunities, who believed I could be a totally different person than what I had always been, and stood in the gap for me until I found that person. And then they supported me in figuring out how to give back,” he said.
Once a person is in recovery, how they stay in recovery is they have to find a way to give it back, he said. “It’s really, really important. It’s part of the process.”
He said programs like IRACS are not only essential to help other people who are still struggling and who are “still down in it,” but also to help people who have found their way out to stay out.
While there are many reentry programs across the country, Whitaker said IRACS is very unique and the success they have had over the last three years has been insurmountable.
In fall 2021, Whitaker had been running the IRACS program in the Howard County Jail where it was created to stop people from dying leaving the jail and to do well. Inmates would leave the jail, only to die after they got out.
Working with the sheriff, he said they realized people leave the jail without the resources they need, “people don’t know what they don’t know,” when you’re going to help someone coming out it’s always good to help someone who looks like you that can relate to you and “waiting until someone leaves to start helping is way too late.”
The main mantra they came up with in the IRACS program was “reentry begins at day one.” That means the moment someone gets arrested and brought to jail, reentry starts right then. “We start helping and working toward reentry right then. And as you can imagine, it takes everybody to be on the same page to make that happen,” he said.
Whitaker was approached by Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb’s office to pilot and expand the IRACS program and the state funded them. The funding came from Next Level Recovery, the governor’s office, the Division of Mental Health and Addiction and was collaborated with Mental Health America of Indiana.
There were several components they knew they had to have in order to have a reentry program that was going to be effective and efficient. Whitaker said those components included a sheriff who was willing to do something out of the box, donate jail space and let peers into the jail to work full time 40 hours a week. The peer teams are a part of the sheriff’s teams. Five sheriffs were willing last year to pilot the program.
He said you have to have city and county leaders who are recovery focused and want to see a “recovery ecosystem” grow in their community. Whitaker said it is expensive at $400-$500,000 a year to run an IRACS program. That doesn’t include the community teams.
“It’s a lot of money, but if you build a community, you give people a whole sense of community for recovery,” he said.
The courts, prosecutors, public defenders and community corrections also must buy in the program.
For the pilot sites, five Indiana counties were chosen - Delaware, Scott, Dearborn, Davies and Blackford counties - to learn as much as they could in the pilot year about how the program works.
IRACS has five engagement pathways. Level A is for an inmate who has spent a lot of time in jail. Level B is for an inmate who is getting out in the next 30-90 days. Level C is for a jail inmate going to prison. Level D is for someone who might get arrested on like a Saturday and then bond out or get released by the courts on Monday or Tuesday. The final level, E, is for inmates who claim not to have any problems and refuses service.
“When we first started IRACS, and we launched the five pilot sites, we were at 50-50. Half there wanted help, half of the people there didn’t want help. I can tell you by the sixth-month mark, 92% of the people in the jails were participating in IRACS,” Whitaker said.
He then presented six-month data and one-year data on IRACS.
Between July 1 and Jan. 1, IRACS peers supported 2,004 individuals in the jail. From July 1 to June 1, 2023, they supported over 5,000 people in the five jails, he stated. He said they provided almost 3,500 intake surveys and that was over 8,000 by the end of the grant cycle year. They had 13,788 one-on-one meetings with people in the first six months and over 30,000 for the year. They provided almost 3,000 groups as of Jan. 1, and they’re about 6,500 groups by the end of the year. There were over 1,000 recovery plans by Jan. 1, and pushing over 3,000 recovery plans by the end of the year.
“The first 30 days of reentry are the most dangerous 30 days of someone’s story. Period. Actually, the first 48 hours, the risk of overdosing death or those who IV drug use is like 89%. It’s ridiculous. In the first two weeks, it jumps to 127%, so it’s really, really high,” Whitaker said.
Out of the five sites, the highest success rate - which he said means people staying engaged for the first 30 days - is 86%, with the lowest being 61%. The national average is 29% success rate with reentry.
Whitaker also talked about how the IRACS program has changed jails into almost being like recovery centers and inmates are leading their own recovery meetings in between meetings.
“It’s completely changed the culture inside the jails. Completely changed the culture. I’m not saying it’s perfect because it’s not perfect, but I will tell you it’s been really pretty extraordinary,” he said.
The final year report will be released in the next three weeks.
“The second thing, and this is why we’re here today, is we had so much success with the program last year, the governor’s office decided they’re going to fund the current five sites for another and they’ve given us enough funding to expand to 10 more sites throughout the state,” he said.
Asked specifically where Kosciusko County is in the process, Whitaker said he couldn’t really say what they’re doing until they announce it publicly, with the decision being made Monday.
“But I will tell you ... a community has to meet all the benchmarks. It’s a lot of money, it’s a lot of investment. This program launched like a freight train, so once it goes it goes full board, so you have to have the right pieces in place, and all the pieces have to be there. ... What I also will say is, out of the communities we looked at, and I looked at over 20, there’s only about five that meet all the benchmarks and Kosciusko County is one of those that meets all the benchmarks,” Whitaker said.
Sheriff Jim Smith spoke about how supportive he was of the program, while Prosecuting Attorney’s Office Chief Deputy Dan Hampton said he thought it was a game changer. Prosecutor Brad Voelz pointed out all the community support that was present at Wednesday’s community meeting.
“People think that being in jail is hard and then getting out of jail is the easy part of it. It’s not. It’s the opposite of that, right? Once you’re in the jail for a while that becomes easy. The meals are provided, the bed is provided, your schedule is provided. Everything is provided for you. It’s hard coming out, and that’s what this program addresses,” Voelz said.
Smith also said IRACS will not supplant the Jail Chemical Addiction Program (JCAP), but will run parallel to it.
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