Outgoing prisons chief: Too many locked up
State should pursue criminal sentencing reform, Mohr says.
Gary Mohr wishes he could have done more.
When he started as a teacher’s aide at Marion Correctional Institution in 1974 (at $2.64 an hour), Ohio prisons held 8,300 inmates.
Now, as he departs Friday after serving since 2011 as director of the Department of Rehabilitation and Correction, Mohr’s “biggest disappointment” centers on the numbers.
State prisons today hold 49,500, or six times as many inmates, including 4,000 women; 44 years ago, there were only 290 women behind bars.
“That’s what I am disheartened with,” Mohr said. “And, there was not a significant change in the rate of crime, no significant change in state population.”
Ohio needs criminal-sentencing reform to correct a system that sends too many people, particularly drug-possession offenders, to prison instead of routing them to treatment, he said.
Though a state initiative is making a dent in diverting some people from prison, “truly non-violent addictive individuals can be served twice as effectively in local communities and at a third of the cost,” Mohr said. More prisoners — 2,738, or 14.7 percent — were committed for drug possession last year than for any other offense.
Fixed sentencing sends some to prison to “learn” from gang members and hardcore criminals, he said.
Mohr supports the concept of Issue 1 on the Nov. 6 ballot, which would convert some low-level drug felonies to misdemeanors with no jail time and would grant a 25 percent “good time” credit to reduce the sentences of some inmates who participate in education or vocational programs. But he still is studying the measure, particularly on how it could impact probationers who violate the terms of their release.
Sentencing reforms in neighboring Michigan reduced its prison population from 51,400 in 2006 to 38,800, and its violent crime rate dropped more than Ohio’s, Mohr said. “There is a better way and we know drug treatment works.”
Temporary leader
Stuart Hudson, the prison agency’s managing director of health care and fiscal operations, will take over as interim director Friday, Gov. John Kasich’s office announced Tuesday. The agency, with a nearly $1.8 billion annual budget and more than 12,000 employees, operates 27 prisons holding 49,534 inmates at an average daily cost of $72.23 each.
Mohr, 65, said he plans to do consulting work for the prison system in North Carolina, where five correction officers have been killed during the past year.
He served as director of Gov. George V. Voinovich’s Office of Criminal Justice from 1992 to ’94, leading an investigation into the deadly Lucasville prison riot and recommending reforms. He later became a deputy prisons director for administration and formerly was warden of Ross Correctional Institution, Chillicothe Correctional Institution and the Correction Reception Center. Mohr and his wife live in Chillicothe.
Hudson, 46, the interim director, joined the agency as a parole officer in 1994. He has held his current position for five years and previously supervised prisoner health-care services. He is a former warden of Mansfield Correctional Institution and Pickaway Correctional Institution.
Mohr said the “toughest days” he spent on the job involved the 15 executions he supervised. But unlike two of his predecessors, Reginald Wilkinson and Terry Collins, the experience has not turned him into an opponent of the death penalty.
It was his duty he said, “to ensure a humane experience for every party, whether the condemned inmate, the victims, family members of the inmate and our staff.
“I also believe it is the law. I believe a director has a responsibility to ensure that the law is followed, but to do it in a way that demonstrates compassion to every party.”