By Scott Edger
Little Apple Post
Following nine years of flat funding, Riley County Community Corrections and its sister agencies around the state are in crisis.
Riley County Community Corrections Director Shelly Williams told the Board of the Board of Commissioners Monday that her agency needs its direct support and action in order to fulfill its mandated mission.
Riley County Community Corrections provides supervision of moderate to high-risk adult felony and juvenile offenders in Riley and Clay Counties.
There are about 115 adult offenders currently registered with Riley County community corrections, according to Williams, with about 70 of those being for person felonies.
Kansas has a trifurcated system of community supervision. Three different entities currently fulfill roles within the system.
The Kansas judicial branch provides support services and, while the County funds operations and provide space, the workers are state employees. The Department of Corrections operates jails and runs the parole system, again with state employees funded through the DOC budget.
For this fiscal year, the Kansas legislature appropriated roughly $10.8 million for judicial branch pay increases and $4.3 million for its support officer positions.
The DOC provides Community Corrections with funding and oversight, however individual offices are county agencies and staffed with county employees.
This year governor Laura Kelly issued an executive order shortly before Thanksgiving that allocated just over $500,000 for parole officer pay increases fiscal year 2022, and almost $1 million for 2022.
According to Williams, Community Corrections agencies did not receive any of the approved new funding.
“Those salary increases for the other agencies impact Community Corrections’ ability to maintain its own workforce,” she said, “and as a result public safety is, and will be negatively impacted.”
She also pointed out that for at least the last nine years funding for community corrections has remained essentially flat. Community Corrections funding comes out of the state's general fund - competing against roads and schools and every other line item.
Williams said that when agencies are underfunded and understaffed, caseloads become too large to adequately supervise high risk offenders and “intensive supervision is at risk.”
The offenders her agency supervises in the community have serious criminal histories and over 53 percent have both mental health and substance use issues, according to Williams. She said it simply comes down to having enough staff to do effective work.
“Community Corrections officers do not have enough time to spend with these offenders doing the difficult work of changing offender behavior,” she said. “Underfunded agencies cannot afford to dedicate staff time to programming targeted teaching.”
Williams asked commissioners to use whatever influence or connections they may have two influence legislation to better compensate community corrections personnel, and hopefully maintain and attract employees.
“The inability to recruit and maintain skilled staff means less experience and specialized officers,” Williams said, “and less means more... more crime, more victims, more jail confinement, more future recidivism.”
Williams said agencies around the state are working closely with the Kansas Secretary of Corrections, Jeff Zmuda, who is advocating strongly for increased funding for Community Corrections.