BY ANNE MICHAUD
The Cincinnati Enquirer
The choice: Confront violent inner demons or peel potatoes.
When asked how they would rather spend two months, people convicted of repeatedly beating their loved ones most often chose working in the jail's kitchen over entering a locked treatment program for batterers.
Either path released them in 60 days instead of 180. One held the most hope of change in their lives.
Disgusted by the statistics and worried about the underuse of a year-old treatment program, officials of the court, jail and probation department eliminated the peeling potatoes option at the end of September.
The move signals a further step down a path of society's intolerance toward domestic violence. Criminal justice experts say domestic violence is to the 1990s what drunken driving was to the 1980s.
In mid-August, just four men were incarcerated in the Hamilton County treatment program, which can hold 20. Today, with the new policy, enrollment is bumping up near capacity.
"Prior to doing this, we virtually had nobody in the program," said Larry Williams, a vice president with Talbert House, which runs the Intensive Batterers Intervention Program (IBIP) in collaboration with the YWCA's Amend day counseling service. "There was one point where it didn't benefit the sheriff to provide (guard) staff because there were not enough people to stand watch over," Mr. Williams said.
Peeling potatoes is shorthand for community service programs the sheriff offers to inmates -- kitchen duty and janitorial work -- that give them double or triple credit for time served.
Another reason the program has been underused is that the sheriff had concerns it was not secure enough for some of the most violent offenders, said Municipal Court Judge Mark Schweikert. He said Talbert House and the sheriff are working on strengthening IBIP's security.
Also, some offenders balked at the probation time and continuing treatment required after leaving IBIP.
Others do not want to face their problems. "A lot of times they're in denial," Judge Schweikert said. "It's always somebody else's fault."
Because it's a locked, secure facility, IBIP is unusual. Most treatment programs for batterers do not lock them up overnight.
This program grew out of a fear of jail crowding as a result of a tougher state law that went into effect in March 1995, doubling the number of domestic violence arrests within days. During the first week that March, 162 people were arrested on domestic violence charges; by the second week, that had soared to 331.
County officials have found creative ways to punish offenders. They bought juris monitors, legwear that alerts authorities when the batterer is too close to the victim's home or office. They created IBIP to cure people, if possible.
Diana Pearson, director of IBIP, said most batterers blame their victims at first. About 95 percent use drugs or alcohol. All handle anger badly.
So the program works on those problems. "It's a hard behavior to change, but we really confront the issue," Ms. Pearson said. Inmates learn alternatives to lashing out: Talking it over, walking away, doing something enjoyable such as playing basketball or drawing.
Only half the people who enter IBIP finish successfully, which Ms. Pearson thinks is good for the first year.
Knowing whether the program works over the long run is going to take more time. A grand total of three people have completed the lock-up time at IBIP plus the probation and follow-up care.
