By patching potholes, maintaining landscaping and cleaning up parks and streets, the hope is that people convicted of crimes will learn a skill to lead them away from committing crimes.
At the same time, the city of Franklin also will get help cleaning up and maintaining downtown streets and landscaping and city parks.
The city and Johnson County Community Corrections are partnering on a new program that would have offenders do community service in the city. In addition to fulfilling a requirement to do community service as part of their sentence, the offenders could also gain skills they could use to get a job, officials said.
The program is needed to help lead low-level offenders away from committing future crimes by helping them build the skills they need to work and earn a living, said Johnson County Superior Court 3 Judge Lance Hamner, who helped organize the program.
Often the offenders he meets in his courtroom have never learned job skills or the work ethic that is needed to be able to find a job and work, he said. That makes it much more difficult for them to succeed, he said.
His hope is that the program will help those offenders by helping them gain skills they could use to apply for a job when they finish serving their sentence.
“Nothing is a perfect answer to anything, but it’s more than they were getting before,” Hamner said.
Officials are also looking at partnering with other agencies on projects, such as building Habitat for Humanity homes, said Jason Cranney, director of the Johnson County Community Corrections program.
Their goal is to create a skills-based program that teaches offenders new skills while also modeling social behavior by working alongside the people who are doing those jobs for local governments and organizations, Cranney said. At the end of the day, they can see the impact they have made by the work they have been able to get done, he said.
At the same time, offenders will be giving back to the community, Cranney said.
The work will also help the city, especially during warm weather when people are spending time in downtown Franklin at festivals and in city parks, Barnett said. Offenders can work alongside the city’s street department workers patching roads, and can also do mowing, landscaping and other work that is needed.
And if the offenders later want to seek a job, they could use that experience as a résumé builder. If they did good work, they could even get a recommendation from the city, he said.
“If we could turn someone’s life around, it would be a good thing for everybody,” Barnett said.
The offenders will be supervised, and the program will not include violent offenders, Barnett said.
Officials hope to start the program in the coming weeks as the weather warms up, he said.
