Students face crime daily in internship with Isabella County Department of Corrections

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Michael Johnson spends five days a week dealing with former convicts.

The Dearborn senior majoring in criminal justice has interned for the Isabella County Department of Corrections in the probation department since January. He and Traverse City senior Lucas Craig are the only two Central Michigan University interns in their field.

Johnson completed his 300 hours on Friday. He said the experience of becoming involved with the lives of criminals was a major culture shock.

“The first two weeks I was taken aback by how these people live their lives,” Johnson said. “Seeing some of the homes was pretty traumatic.”

The interns’ jobs are to assist to the field agents, commonly referred to as probation officers. They meet with those on probation, and sometimes do in-home visits and investigative interviews, analyzing the probationers situation.

They then write up a pre-sentence investigation report and submit it to a judge for evaluation. Johnson said for every five minutes of action they see, there is a week of paperwork.

He said the work involves seeing tragic circumstances. He described entering a trashed home with pills scattered all over the floor and a neglected dog that had left feces everywhere.

He said the overwhelming smell reminds him of the importance of the work they do in attempting to give offenders a chance to rehabilitate.

“Sometimes if you take the extra 10 minutes with someone instead of treating them like a number, they’ll actually turn into a pretty good person,” he said. “It’s a much harder job than just arresting people — you have to make them effective, productive citizens again.”

The interns are closely supervised by John Spooner, a probation agent for Isabella County. Spooner has 15 years experience in the field and said the interns’ workload has given the staff a breather.

“They do a lot for us,” he said. “All of them have been outstanding.”

Craig is double majoring in sociology and psychology with a concentration in criminal justice. He said the material he learns in class has helped him with his work, although nothing could have prepared him to deal with the criminal structure in society.

“Being a student, I never took it to heart as personal,” Craig said. “Working here, I understand why because there’s nothing else we can do.”

Craig said he feels the job is supervising people in order to help keep them stable. Some individuals he has hope for, but he feels the situation for many is just to keep offenders from harming others without locking them away for life.

“Some of these people have been on probation longer than the agents have been here,” Craig said. “They’re not going to get out of probation, but they’re not out there committing horrible crimes because we’re supervising them.”