VANDERBURGH COUNTY, Ind. –Vanderburgh County Sheriff Noah Robinson met Wednesday with four individuals in custody at the Vanderburgh County Jail who completed the facility’s Moral Reconation Therapy (MRT) program, congratulating each graduate personally and hearing about their plans for release.
Moral Reconation Therapy is a structured, evidence-based cognitive behavioral program used in jails, prisons, drug courts, and community corrections across the country. Participants work through a series of steps in a workbook and present their work to peers and trained facilitators, who decide whether each step has been completed honestly and in full. Research on MRT in correctional settings has consistently linked program completion to lower rates of reoffending.
“MRT focuses on accountability, honest self-assessment, goal setting and repairing the harm participants have caused to their families and to the community,” said Becca Brass, a licensed clinical social worker at the jail.
Sheriff Robinson spent time with the graduating class, speaking with participants about the work they had put in and the obstacles waiting for them on the outside.
“The people in that room did the hardest work there is,” Robinson said. “They took an honest look at the thinking that landed them in my jail, and they made a decision to change it.”
Robinson also used the occasion to make the case for investing in jail-based treatment and programming rather than expanding incarceration capacity.
“We are spending enormous sums on prison capacity in this state, and I understand the pressure driving it. But a cell is just a place to put somebody. It doesn’t change anybody,” Robinson said. “A program like MRT costs a small fraction of what it costs to build and staff a new bed, and it is delivered right here in the county jail, where most of these individuals are already being held and where they will be released back into this community. If the goal is fewer victims and fewer repeat offenders, funding jail-based programming is the better buy. Every person who completes this program, graduates from drug court or finishes work release, and doesn’t come back, is a jail bed we never had to build.”
MRT is offered at the Vanderburgh County Jail alongside mental health services and competency restoration, peer-based reentry support, substance use treatment, and faith-based programming, all of which are available to eligible individuals in custody.
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