Mike Willets retires, reflects on 52-year career in community corrections

Fifty-two years after he first took a job with the Ohio Adult Parole Authority, and following a successful career building and redefining community corrections in Lorain County, Mike Willets is retiring. "It's more like 51-and-a-half years," the longtime public servant joked. Willets is going out as executive director of the Lorain/Medina Community Based Correctional Facility, or CBCF. He's only the second one, and the longest-tenured, that the facility has had in its nearly 30-year history. Far from taking credit for the successful programs he backed and built, Willets said it all worked because of the partnerships and relationships he built over the decades with judges, elected officials, state officials, fellow probation officers, board members and community advocates. An alternative to prison for low-level felony offenders, the CBCF is a secure, 130-bed facility on Murray Ridge Road in Elyria. Its residents are men and women whom judges believe could benefit from behavioral and addiction treatment, educational and vocational opportunities instead of incarceration. Willets has been in charge of the CBCF since 2005. Under his leadership, it won the 2016 Clifford Skeen award for best community-based correctional facility in the state and went through a major, million-dollar expansion in 2017 to add both housing and state Adult Parole Authority, or APA, offices to its campus. A 1970 graduate of Elyria Catholic High School and a 1974 graduate of Bowling Green State University, Willets almost took a different route into corrections work, recalling how his first job out of college was an internship at a federal prison where they tried to recruit him as a guard. "The wanted to put me in a guard tower with a rifle and a radio and a phone, and said 'If someone gets near the fences, the tripwire? Shoot 'em,'" Willets recalled. He declined the job offer, he said. Instead, Willets joined the APA, where he rose to supervisor for Richland, Huron, Ashland and Lorain counties and was recognized by the state for starting a drug treatment program at Pickaway Correctional Institution, southwest of Columbus. In 1990, Willets wrote a grant for $131,000 to start the Lorain County Adult Probation Department. He hired three officers and a secretary "who later turned into a lab tech," he said. Willets estimated he's written $20 million in grants over the years, bringing that money back to Lorain County from state and federal sources. Under Willets, Adult Probation won its first Cliff Skeen award in 1994. In 1996 he started a misdemeanor intensive supervision program, the first of many such programs still used to oversee people on community control or probation in Lorain County. The 1990s was also a time when then-sheriff Martin Mahony faced an overcrowding problem at the Lorain County Jail. Willets said the two collaborated on an electronic monitoring program for court-supervised, pretrial release that helped fix that problem. "We did very well with that. We got a lot of people (out of) the jail that didn't need to be there," Willets said. Willets also helped start the Lorain County Crime/Drug Lab, now known as the Lorain County Forensics Lab, to test people serving probation who were, Willets said, not always truthful about their substance use. While chief probation officer, Willets also worked with the late Common Pleas Judge Lynette McGough to write the original grant proposal for what would eventually become the CBCF. McGough was good at picking up the phone and calling people who could get things done, Willets remembered. County officials in Lorain and Medina joined forces, built the CBCF and it opened in 1997 with 60 beds. Following his retirement as chief probation officer in 2005, Willets became the second director of the CBCF. The CBCF eventually doubled in size, adding more men's beds and a women's wing. Willets and his staff brought in job training courses in welding and restaurant food safety, and he said he'd put the CBCF's high school equivalency, or GED, program up against any other in the county for how good it is. Over the years, state officials came through with funding because "they knew they'd get their dollar's worth" in Lorain County, Willets said. It could also be due to the years of clean audits the CBCF has had under Willets and his staff's leadership. OhioMeansJobs is another partnership Willets said helped the people he was responsible for. "The state called and said 'Mike ... you want any money?'" for job training, Willets said. All the success, "I did it with the help of others, with the sheriff, the commissioners, with whomever," he said. "Trying to keep (CBCF) full was the mission .. I'm really happy with what happened." The occasional escape happened over the years, but Willets said everyone was picked back up. "Escapees tend to go home," he said, which made them "mostly easy to catch." Don Nickerson, the longtime operations director at CBCF, is taking over for Willets. He said nothing will replace what his predecessor brought to the job. "Here's the thing about Mike: If you know him and you take the time and you pay attention, the man is a wealth of knowledge," Nickerson said, rattling off a list of Willets' accomplishments. Willets' second retirement "is a loss to our community, to the facility for sure," Nickerson said, "but he's done done by any stretch ... I know he has more to give. Maybe it's in corrections, maybe it's in his church, maybe with his family, but he's not done." About that future, Willets said he plans to keep teaching online courses at Lorain County Community College. He also likes to go on walks with his wife Debbie, he said. "I don't know what else I'm gonna do. I don't do sports," he said with a laugh. "I don't travel. People used to make fun of me that I didn't want to leave the county ever, but I have grandkids in Cleveland Heights, I have to travel out of the county!" Contact Dave O'Brien at (440) 329-7129 or dobrien@chroniclet.com