The Sandusky County Jail in northern Ohio is relatively small. On average, about 80 people are incarcerated there and most don’t stay for more than a year.
So, for a long time, there wasn’t much investment in educational programming.
“They had tried off and on for a few years with a GED program,” said Deputy Caren Nemitz. “That didn't really gain any traction.”
But recently, that’s changed.
A couple years ago, the Sandusky County Jail was the first in Ohio to launch a program called IGNITE, which stands for Inmate Growth Naturally and Intentionally through Education.
IGNITE started in 2020 at a county jail in Flint, Michigan. The sheriff there wanted to shift the jail’s culture and reduce the rate of people returning to jail – called recidivism. So they started offering courses to teach skills like financial literacy and parenting.
Since then, the National Sheriff’s Association has adopted the program and it’s spread to more than 25 jails across the country.
Ohio jails launching IGNITE programs
In Ohio, the Fayette and Washington County Sheriff's Offices each launched IGNITE programs at their jails this spring.
“We're using the program as a cornerstone to focus on education, along with different mental health services, to help fight generational recidivism,” said Lieutenant Dustin Timberman, director of inmate services for the Washington County Jail in Marietta.
There, he says long-time corrections officers sometimes see members of the same family cycle through the criminal justice system.
“They're seeing not only grandkids, but great-grandkids of people who they've initially started dealing with when they were in their infancy of their careers,” he said. “So if we can help people get to a point where, once they get released, they can go and better their lives, then it will help them and it will help their families, so that we don't see different generations of them coming in repeatedly.”
The IGNITE program focuses on education to tackle problems like this, but specific courses vary depending on each location’s needs and the availability of local resources.
“So it looks different for every site,” Nemitz, the IGNITE program coordinator with the Sandusky County Sheriff’s Office, said. “There are some sites that are bigger and they have a lot of money. And there are some sites like ours that are really rural. We don't have a lot of funding.”
In Sandusky County, IGNITE includes a pathway for people to get their GED.
Victor Aguilar is one of a handful of students aiming for that diploma. He participates in weekly classes, where he practices skills like reading comprehension and finding the mean, median and mode of data sets. He’s hopeful the free education will help him find a job as an electrician when he gets out of jail.
There are also courses that focus on teaching life skills: anger management, job interviewing and substance use.
“We have a lot of people with drug issues and then they have mental health or a trauma aspect to that too,” Nemitz said. “That's the part I've been focusing on is working in education and support for that.”
Opioid Remediation Grants
Sandusky County’s IGNITE program has been funded with grants from the United Way and a local Mental Health and Addiction Services Board. Now, it’s being supplemented with a $172,291 Opioid Remediation Grant from the state attorney general’s office.
Since March, the office has allocated more than $3.5 million in opioid settlement funds to nearly two dozen jails through that grant program. It’s intended to get incarcerated people access to treatment and reduce the number of fatal overdoses in Ohio jails.
An estimated 65% of people in jail nationwide have substance use disorders, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, and in the past four years, at least 70 of the roughly 200 deaths in Ohio jails were attributed to substance abuse.
Nemitz said the Sandusky County Jail plans to use its grant money to add to its substance abuse programming and to help with medication-assisted therapy. Both, she said, could help incarcerated people hit the ground running once they’re released.
“[We are] facilitating that reentry back into society, instead of just opening the door and saying, ‘All right, there you go, don't come back,’” she said. “That doesn’t work.”
Success of IGNITE
Researchers from Harvard, Brown and the University of Michigan found those who enrolled in the program in Flint gained, on average, a full grade level in reading and math.
They also found a single month of the program reduced weekly instances of misconduct in jail by half and, longer term, it reduced one-year recidivism by almost 25%.
Michael Hill, one of the first to participate in IGNITE at the Sandusky County Jail, attests to its influence.
“For me, and I can only speak for myself, without that program, I probably would be, I can't say dead, but I probably would still be incarcerated,” he said. “I probably would still be spiraling down that drinking path. I probably wouldn't have no confidence in myself to move past my mistakes.”
Using the job interviewing skills and connections he gained through the IGNITE program, Hill now works with a packaging company in Sandusky County.
Now, with added addiction support, he hopes more people will find the same success.
