Richland Correctional Institution

RICHLAND CORRECTIONAL INSTITUTION

• Pound Puppy Program: The Pound Puppy program trains 7 to 8 dogs each cycle, which lasts 7 weeks. The dogs are taught 5 basic commands and 2 certified instructor volunteers are utilized from the Richland County Dog Kennel Club. The program works in conjunction with Kind Hands 4 Paws (Zanesville), Logan County Shelter (Bellevue), and Mid Ohio Animal Welfare League.
• Family Life Center: The Family Life Center seeks to provide offenders with a variety of programming needs to help build the bridge between incarcerated fathers and their children. Program opportunities that assist in that mission include Responsible Family Life Skills, Success After Prison, From the Inside Out, Victim Awareness, Financial Management and Reclaiming American Citizenship.
• PROVE: The Personal Responsibility of Violence Elimination program focuses on offenders whose crimes include domestic violence behavior. The 13-week program aims at increasing awareness of the offenders' behavior while providing avenues to change.
• 90 Day Intensive Outpatient Program: This program is provided by Recovery Services staff and functions to instill knowledge into offenders regarding the disease of chemical dependency and its' effect on the various areas of the offenders' life. This is approached in a holistic manner rather than strictly discussing substance abuse, and offenders receive 9 hours of group work for 12 weeks.

Reading Room
 

In 2000, former First Lady Hope Taft approached the Director about establishing a reading room for the children who visited their incarcerated parent at the Pickaway Correctional Institution. This idea spread across the state, and now the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction maintains children’s reading rooms in each of the 32 institutions. The reading rooms encourage family literacy by providing a pleasant and comfortable setting for both child and incarcerated parent. Each room is stocked with a wide variety of children’s books and has an inmate narrator who reads to the visiting children twice a day. The role of the inmate narrator is to read picture books to the children in much the same manner that children’s hour would be done at a public library. A variety of arts and craft supplies for the children are also available in most of the rooms. Many of the supplies and books are donated by employees and service organizations. This past year the Department served over 45,000 children. The inmate narrators worked over 32,000 hours in reading to and with the children.
 

Visit the Reading Room at Richland

• Tuesday through Saturday, 8:00 a.m. to 3 p.m. Visitors must arrive no later than 2 p.m. No visits on holidays.
• Visiting hours are subject to change without notice. Please call the institution to verify visiting hours before planning a visit.

For general visiting information or to download a visitor application, go to http://www.drc.state.oh.us/web/visiting.htm.