For more than half a century, Gary Mohr worked inside America’s correctional system. He started as a prison literacy teacher earning $2.64 an hour in Ohio in 1974 and eventually rose to become director of the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction under Republican Gov. John Kasich and later served as the 106th president of the American Correctional Association.
Mohr believes the correctional system must shift its focus from punishment alone to prevention, rehabilitation and successful reentry—a perspective informed by more than 50 years overseeing prisons, parole systems and correctional staff in one of the nation’s largest correctional systems.
At a time when political rhetoric has refocused on harsher penalties and longer sentences, Mohr argues that public safety depends on addressing the causes of crime before people enter the criminal legal system and investing in rehabilitation for those who eventually do.
“I started my career July 1st, 1974 in a prison and it was in an Ohio prison and Ohio at that time had 8,400 Ohioans in its prisons,” Mohr said during a recent interview with the Vanguard. “I became director of the Department of Rehabilitation Correction with John Kasich on January 4th, 2011. I inherited 51,000 Ohioans in prison.”
The dramatic expansion of incarceration over his career fundamentally shaped his thinking.
“During my career, it went from 8,400 to 51,000,” Mohr said. “Now it’s down a little bit. We pushed it down.”
He posed a question that has stayed with him for years.
“My question is with people with gray hair like I do, that were alive in 1974, do we feel safer today having locked up 51,000. an over 600% increase in the prison population all the construction that had to be used and all the staffing that had to be used to watch people in prison, do people feel safer today than they did in 1974?” he asked. “And I don’t think they do.”
Mohr’s observations align with findings from a newly released national survey by the Alliance for Safety and Justice examining the views of active-duty law enforcement and correctional officers on crime prevention and public safety. The report found overwhelming support among officers for community-based interventions and rehabilitation strategies traditionally viewed as outside the scope of conventional law enforcement approaches.
According to the survey, 92% of officers agreed that police departments are burdened with social problems beyond crime. Nearly 90% said their departments are not equipped to adequately address issues involving mental health crises, homelessness and substance use disorders.
The survey also found that 80% agreed that community residents trained in violence interruption, conflict mediation and youth mentoring would help reduce violence while making officers’ jobs safer and easier. Support increased to 90% among officers who had firsthand experience working with such programs.
For Mohr, those findings merely confirmed realities he had witnessed throughout his career.
“We closed the mental health hospitals during my career, a lot of them,” Mohr said. “We created significantly a larger number of drug laws and we established so many mandatory sentences that lengthened the sentences and it all added up to us [with an] over 600% increase.”
“Crime didn’t take place and start on the event of the occurrence, the crime,” he added. “It started way upstream.”
He said law enforcement officers increasingly find themselves responding to situations they were never trained to address.
“I’m a believer much like the law enforcement survey supported that we ought to be on, providing more support to law enforcement dealing with issues that do not necessarily have criminal intent, overdoses, those in mental health issues, and supporting them more and basically reinvesting money earlier in people’s lives,” Mohr said.
During his tenure as Ohio corrections director, Mohr attempted to put those principles into practice.
“When I was director, we reduced a prison population through a strategic effort working with the legislature and other things, other groups,” he said. “And I was able to take $58 million out of my prison budget and just give to the local counties and say, ‘I want you to invest in programs that help divert people from prison and help address the specific needs that prison doesn’t necessarily address very well.'”
“We took $58 million out by reducing the prison population, taking that money and investing it in local communities, which is exactly aligned with what the survey said,” he added.
One example involved Lucas County, home to Toledo, Ohio.
“Lucas County started with drop-off centers,” Mohr said. “So if law enforcement encountered a situation that was a person in mental health crisis … they would have drop-off centers where people could be dropped off, either that were having an overdose and a drug overdose or a mental health crisis.”
The approach diverted people away from jail while connecting them to appropriate treatment.
“It averted a lot of people from having to book in a jail, develop a criminal record, and it gave a lot more support to local law enforcement,” Mohr said.
“So it can be done.”
Mohr believes correctional systems also need to rethink how they prepare incarcerated people for release.
“Public safety requires reducing the likelihood that people enter the system in the first place and, just as importantly, reducing the likelihood that they return,” he wrote recently in a USA Today opinion piece.
The Alliance for Safety and Justice survey found that 73% of law enforcement officers support policies allowing parole boards to consider early release for incarcerated individuals who participate in rehabilitation, education and job training programs. Correctional officers expressed particularly strong support for such approaches.
Mohr said years of evaluating evidence-based programs convinced him those interventions work.
“I had him in every prison in Ohio for three years,” Mohr said, referring to the late University of Cincinnati criminologist Dr. Edward Latessa. “He after three years came out with a statistical study … that outlined by program by program the degree of reduction in prison violence and a degree of reduction in future crime or recidivism based on completing specific types of programs.”
The evidence led him to conclude that incarceration alone cannot achieve public safety goals.
“If these folks are involved in these programs and completing these programs and the evidence says it reduces their propensity to commit another crime, then if they’re okay with earlier release than what they would typically be, so would I be,” Mohr said.
He added that community supervision programs often outperform prisons at a fraction of the cost.
“Put them in a community program, which is twice as effective at one third of the cost than prison and save some of those resources for the community for prevention programs,” he said. “Let’s start investing the money back earlier in people’s lives.”
Underlying Mohr’s philosophy is a belief in human dignity.
“I think the core of these issues … is the question, are people that are in jail and prison human beings?” he said. “If we believe they are, I think it takes us to, okay, what does evidence say helps those folks restore their lives and keep the public safe?”
“If we believe that somehow they’re less than a human being,” he continued, “then it drives us to incapacitation.”
Mohr said decades of working with incarcerated people convinced him that transformation is possible.
“I’m a believer, that I’ve seen lives changed and I would like to think that at least in some small way, I’ve been part of some of those life changes because by the grace of God, there go I,” he said.
His perspective was informed partly by his own troubled adolescence.
“I was a school truant, barely made it through high school,” Mohr said. “I fortunately did a lot better at Ohio State University, but I barely made it through high school because I lost my mother. I was trying to raise myself by myself and I did a terrible job.”
“So I know that by the grace of God, there go I.”
He said that understanding shaped how he approached leadership.
“I’ve tried to always instill in it our staff,” Mohr said. “We reduced our vision statement to this, to reduce recidivism among those we touch and that was our entire vision.”
“If we do that, we’d have a safe prison, we’d be program rich and we’re going to try to focus on ensuring that people get what they need.”
Mohr acknowledged that reform efforts remain politically difficult.
“It is disappointing to me that those folks that are running for office locally and on the state level particularly … continue to push this kind of rhetoric of tough on crime,” he said.
“You don’t hear a lot of people running for office talking like you and I are, you just don’t.”
“And so that rhetoric has trumped the research that has demonstrated that people can change and we know the kind of tools to use,” he added. “That rhetoric has trumped all of that.”
After more than five decades inside prisons and correctional systems, Mohr said his core beliefs have remained remarkably consistent.
“I didn’t go into corrections to punish or incapacitate,” he said. “I really believe that I went into prison work to help change lives.”
Looking back across a career that spanned one of the most punitive eras in American criminal justice history, Mohr said the path forward is increasingly clear.
“We now have a lot of evidence to show us what works in corrections,” he said.
For Mohr, the choice facing policymakers is whether to continue investing primarily in punishment after harm occurs or shift resources toward prevention, rehabilitation and community support before lives unravel.
“Public safety is not achieved through enforcement and incarceration alone,” he wrote in USA Today. “It depends on a system that invests in prevention, supports rehabilitation and aligns resources with the realities faced by law enforcement and corrections professionals.”
“By moving away from outdated models of crime and punishment and toward evidence-based strategies for crime prevention,” Mohr added, “we can centralize safety for all, improve the lives of law enforcement officers and be better stewards of taxpayer funds.”
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