Indiana Cuts Force Marion County to Wind Down Treatment Courts

Marion County's reentry court and drug court have stopped accepting new applicants as the county moves to shut both programs down, the first visible consequence of a state grant cut that is squeezing problem-solving courts across Indiana.

The Indiana Department of Correction eliminated roughly $600,000 that had supported the county's drug, reentry and veterans courts. Veterans court will keep operating through 2027 on money from the state's Office of Court Services, but county officials say both veterans court and mental health court could cease operations by the end of next year. At least 60 of Indiana's 92 counties run one or more problem-solving courts, according to WFYI and Mirror Indy, which reported the cuts this week.

The reductions reach past Marion County. The Indiana Lawyer reported that the Department of Correction cut its Community Corrections grant for problem-solving courts, reducing total funding from $73 million to $53 million statewide.

What a problem-solving court does that a courtroom does not

The programs are an alternative to conventional prosecution for people whose cases are driven by mental illness or substance use. A participant's case is held while they spend one to three years in supervised treatment: drug and alcohol testing twice a week, appointments with a treatment provider, regular check-ins and court appearances, and a case manager, public defender and clinician assigned to each person.

Participants can also get help with transportation, drug testing costs, sober living and work uniforms. Those who graduate have their case dismissed, and under Indiana procedure the arrest is expunged from the record 60 days later, which means it does not surface in a rental application or a job background check.

Superior Court Judge Amy Jones, who has overseen the county's mental health courts since her election in 2012, described a courtroom built around familiarity rather than throughput. "It's amazing what an attaboy does for a lot of people that come in," she told WFYI. "They've never heard anyone tell them, 'you know what, great improvement this week. Very proud of you.' I have a lot of incentives and things as well that I can use for people that are doing well, but there's nothing that gives more back than just the power of praise from somebody in this kind of a position."

That model is expensive in staff time and cheap relative to incarceration — which is the argument its defenders keep returning to, and the one budget writers keep discounting.

A participant halfway through

The reporting follows Aprili, an artist who goes by one name, who graduated from North Central High School in 2006 with thousands of dollars in scholarships and then struggled with her mental health for about 14 years.

A public manic episode in December sent her to jail for roughly two and a half months. In May her case was assigned to Marion County's psychiatric assertive identification and referral program, one of the county's problem-solving courts, which pairs behavioral health treatment with legal supervision for defendants with serious mental illness.

She has been stabilizing since, and recently showed writing in a local exhibition. "I could have fallen through the cracks and I could have spiraled through incarceration, lack of mental health management, lack of housing, lack of income, lack of community," she said.

Aprili also raised a consideration that rarely appears in program evaluations. As a Black woman, she said she did not expect a fair hearing at trial. "I would basically be up against a justice system that I don't think is even fair or capable of analyzing the situation with insight into all of the parts that led to the situation unfolding as it did."

The cost argument, and its limits

Ray Casanova, Marion County's chief public defender, has worked with the program for more than 30 years. He told WFYI that the same services can be delivered inside a jail, but with weaker results and a larger bill.

"In the long run, it's just more cost-effective to deal with these issues through treatment courts rather than through treatment in an incarceration setting," Casanova said. More people left untreated in the community, he added, eventually means fuller jails and prisons.

The claim is well established in the research literature on treatment courts and dual diagnosis programming: participants reoffend less and cost less than comparable defendants who are incarcerated. The counterargument is fiscal rather than clinical — a state facing a budget shortfall can book the savings from a court closure immediately and the costs of additional incarceration years later. Nationally, the money around reentry and jail-based treatment has been shifting rather than growing, with several jurisdictions substituting Medicaid billing for grant funding.

For participants already enrolled, Casanova said, the county will let them complete drug treatment court or route them into other services, including the county's Quality of Life Unit, which offers treatment as an alternative to jail. Some judges expect reentry and drug court funding to return in 2028, he said, though no commitment has been made.

What the state has not said

Indiana has not published a plan to replace the programs it cut. The $73 million to $53 million reduction in the Community Corrections grant, first reported by The Indiana Lawyer, has not been accompanied by a public county-by-county allocation, and the Department of Correction has not described how the remaining money will be distributed.

That leaves the counties to sort out sequencing on their own. Marion County closed intake first and is winding down existing cohorts; other counties with problem-solving courts will face the same arithmetic on their own budget calendars. Veterans court has a one-year runway from the Office of Court Services. Mental health court has no date on the calendar at all — only the county's assessment that it could stop by the end of 2027.

For families trying to enter a program now, the practical answer is that the door is narrower than it was last month: reentry and drug court are closed to new applicants in the state's largest county, and the remaining slots sit in a veterans court funded through next year and a mental health court operating without a guarantee past it.