A long-time officer with Starke County Community Corrections is now the chief probation officer in Starke County.
Shawn Mattraw takes the place of John Thorstad who resigned from the chief probation officer position in early March.
Starke County Community Corrections Director Retiring
The Director of Starke County Community Corrections for the past nine years is entering retirement after Friday, April 6.
Robert Hinojosa has spent the past 30 years in community corrections with the majority of his experience in Lake County. He says Starke County has grown in the past nine years with communication between departments.
Starke County Community Corrections to Increase Surveillance, Data Collection with Grant Funds
Starke County Community Corrections will be able to increase compliance checks of those serving home detention, as well as step up its data collection efforts, thanks to a grant from the Indiana Department of Correction. Continue reading
Indiana’s New Criminal Codes Take Effect Today
After nearly 37 years, the criminal codes in Indiana will change today which will create six levels of felonies. Credit time will also change.
Robert Hinojosa, Director of Operations at Starke County Community Corrections, said the change stemmed from a lack of proportionality.
Starke Commissioners Approve Community Corrections Contract App
The Starke County Commissioners this week approved the signing of a contract application for Community Corrections. Robert Hinojosa, director of Starke County Community Corrections, told the commissioners that he wasn’t asking them to sign the contract just yet; he was merely asking them to approve the application for the contract.
Community Corrections Gets Approval to Proceed with Grant Application
Starke County Community Corrections Director, Robert Hinojosa, appeared before the County Commissioners recently to request a letter approving a grant application for 2012. The grant is administered by the Department of Corrections and is for almost $188,000 of a $346,000 Community Corrections budget. The shortfall is made up from user fees. The letter was signed as requested.
One of the goals of the local Community Corrections organization is to become a level one program.
“There’s three levels,” explains Hinojosa. “If you are a level one program, that means that you have done a great job in adopting a lot of the practices, doing good case management work and identifying which service providers are effective, etc. If you are a level two, you are doing a good job but not exceptional and if you are a level three you’ve got some major problems in the way you run your program. The first year they instituted the level status was last year and we came in at a high level two and I was proud of that. We had really limited resources to do some of the things that we were asked to do. I believe that this application we’re submitting will get us to level one.”
Starke County Community Corrections Report Given to Commissioners
Starke County Community Corrections Director, Robert Hinojosa, presented his annual calendar year report to the Starke County Commissioners this week.
Hinojosa talked about the three components of Community Corrections. Those are Home Detention, Community Service, and the Community Transition Program. He talked about the Community Transition Program.
“The offenders who have been sentenced to the Department of Corrections from Starke County all get released back with little or no services available to them so what we’ve chosen to do is provide services in the last 30 to 60 days of their sentence to transition them back,” explained Hinojosa. “We know that if they are unable to access services, they will fail, they will get rearrested, they’ll go back to the Department of Corrections and it’ll be a never ending cycle.”
Week in Review for November 29th-December 3rd, 2010
Here is just some of the news that made the news in the Kankakee Valley this week:
Three Starke County Community Corrections Employees Honored at Annual Conference
Three Starke County government employees were recently honored at the Indiana Association of Community Corrections Annual Conference for outstanding achievement in community corrections for 2010. The Conference was held in Indianapolis.
Kimberly Kennedy was selected as the Program Supervisor for 2010 for her exceptional work in overseeing the Starke County Community Corrections Community Service Component and Robert Shawn Mattraw was selected as the Electronic Monitoring Home Detention Employee of the Year. Director, Robert Hinojosa, also received recognition for his 25 years of service to the Association.
