Montgomery County will not offer housing to homeless people being released from incarceration, ending a unique plan to help former inmates re-enter society.
The decision comes amid concerns over liability and, as one county commissioner put it, the wisdom of opening a facility without having emergency shelter for homeless people without criminal histories.
“I don’t want to seem cold-hearted or mean-spirited about the issue, but I think even above and beyond the liability and the legal aspect of it … what do we do with the people who aren’t in trouble that find themselves in the same situations?” commissioner Dan Guard said Monday before the board denied the probation department’s request to spend state grant money on the project.
Chief probation officer Andria Geigle, who first approached the commissioners with the idea in 2018, already knew she didn’t have the board’s support following informal conversations with members and attorneys. The vote formalized the county’s position, but the department is allowed to keep the grant by submitting a new proposal.
The facility would have provided temporary shelter to qualified clients leaving the county jail or Indiana Department of Corrections with no other safe place to go until they could find a permanent home.
Montgomery was the only one of the five counties in the West Central Regional Community Corrections network to explore justice-involved transitional housing, director Danielle Snider said.
The fee-based housing received support from Judge Heather Barajas of the Montgomery County Drug Treatment Court, where clients sometimes lack supportive housing during the program. The facility would have also been open to former inmates on the sex offender registry.
Geigle said one of the ex-inmates in the community corrections system has spent months searching for a place to live and filed a complaint with the DOC over a lack of assistance.
“Bottom line: It becomes our problem,” Geigle told the commissioners.
“We literally got to the point,” she added, “where we tried to send [clients] to Greencastle or Tippecanoe County because those are the closest to us that have a shelter. And we’ve been flat out told, ‘We’re not taking any more,’ because we call them too often.”
