ALLEN COUNTY, Ind. (WANE) — The new Allen County Jail under construction, drainage and road projects, bridgework and consolidating county properties.
That may sound like a rerun of what Allen County Commissioners focused on in 2024.
But Therese Brown, elected board president Friday at the first commissioners’ weekly legislative meeting of the year, said there’s another concern high on the list.
That’s mental health.
“We need to be raising the bar on what kind of services we can start trying to get more effectively in our Community Corrections as well as in the jail,” she said.
Both Community Corrections and the jail deal with a lot of people suffering from childhood trauma, situational crises, drug and alcohol abuse and mental illness.
Allen County Community Corrections diverts would-be inmates from incarceration to a work-release program at its Residential Services Center off Cook Road or home detention.
“For years and decades, a person commits a crime, has an altercation, has a situation, (then) they enter the system, whether it’s just the local system or they end up having to go to the state Department of Corrections. When they come through the process, we need to figure out how we can have a system in place for the handoff of these individuals,” Brown says.