The court’s jurisdiction includes Centerville, Kettering, Moraine and Washington Twp. Since 2015, the state grant has funded a full-time probation officer to monitor drivers convicted of OVI, part of what Kettering City Manager Matt Greeson called the court’s “innovative practices.”
The first grant the court received was for $161,384 and is $332,600 this year, according to city records.
The program’s aim is to reduce jail time and cut costs by using effective alcohol monitoring devices either on the offender or their automobile, said Marcia Fye, a judicial assistant.
Aside from the probation officer’s salary and benefits, the grant also funds monitoring devices, drug screening supplies, bus passes to provide offenders with transportation for probation appointments, and services “so we can make sure folks are being compliant,” Fye said.
The state aid package allows the officer to be “aggressive in her supervision of her caseload,” she said.
Judge Fred Dressel told the Dayton Daily News eight years ago that one goal was to reduce recidivism by at least 25%. Despite the absence of what Fye called an “apples to apples” comparison with its data, the court appears to have reached that objective.
OVI repeat offenders made up 40% of the court’s supervised probation caseload in 2014. Since the probation officer has been funded by the state, it has recorded OVI conviction data into two groups, Fye said.
One includes offenders on supervised probation for the first time through the state-funded program. By the end of 2019, 4.6% of them returned to that court for a repeat offense and that rate has dropped to 3.2% so far this year, data shows.
But the court tracks them only during their probation, which ranges from two to five years, and records only repeat convictions in Ohio, Fye said.
The second group is tracked by repeat charges occurring up to 20 years after their first conviction and by offenses are as charged.
Since 2019, 25.6% of those charged with an OVI later faced at least a second offense, according to court records.
“We believe the impact of these data flaws would be slight on the numbers as a whole and that the point remains: our OVI probation grant program is accomplishing its goal of reducing OVI recidivism in our community,” according to Fye.
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