Is it time for ‘low level’ offenders to serve time, instead of being placed back in our community to break in to cars, houses, businesses, and sheds? Who loses with the 2003 Advocates ‘Framingham Jail Diversion Program’ (JDP)? Almost 20 years of hurting the residents of Framingham… Is it time to end the JDP?

About 80-90% of low level offenders in Framingham are diverted back into the community by a 20 year old program sponsored by Advocates. This means 100’s of offenders every year, caught breaking into homes, businesses, and cars, are sent back into our community, for ‘treatment’.

Advocates calls the diversion away from the criminal justice system as a “more appropriate, community-based behavioral health treatment’ and it’s goal “to re-direct individuals committing non-violent offences out of the criminal justice system and into more appropriate community based behavioral health services”, but unfortunately this places criminals back into our back yards to re-offend.

At what point will south side, the most affected area, and Framingham as a whole, stand up and say, enough is enough. Taxpayers of the city have played the repeated victims of this program for nearly two decades, a program that only keeps criminals in our community, rather than removing them.

At what point do the rights of the hard working and honest residents, trump the rights of those destroying the community and its reputation as a safe place to live, even if their intent is not that.

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