The Day Reporting Center, a counseling and rehabilitation center on Green Street in Farrell, has spent $394,000 in grant money to rehabilitate two people since its creation earlier this year.

The problem does not lie with the center, said Mercer County Sheriff William Romine and Mark Benedetto, administrator of Community Corrections, which oversees the center. The problem lies in the restrictive manner the grant money has to be used and the limited population of people in the area who are eligible for the program, they told the Mercer County Prison Board Monday.

The center has counseled nine people this year. Of those, one person has dropped out of sight and two have been dropped from the program for violations. Two people have successfully completed the program, Benedetto told the board.

County Commissioner Olivia M. Lazor said the state-funded program was "set up to fail at the outset."

The program, she said, was primarily designed to reduce the number of parolees in the state prison system.

The grant money for the center comes from the Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency.

"The program has a lot of utility if we can get the right people in it," Benedetto said.

The center provides drug and alcohol counseling for nonviolent offenders who have served their sentences. It has several components, he said, including treatment, job training and education programs.

The program is very restrictive as to who can benefit from its services. Only higher level drug and alcohol offenders without a history of violence can be counseled.

The grant money also comes with strict restrictions on how the money can be spent. For instance, Benedetto said, 85 percent of the money has to used to pay for treatment provided by UPMC Horizon.

That does not fully utilize the resources of the program for Mercer County drug offenders who could use it, Benedetto and Romine said.

Benedetto said the program would be better used as a preventative program for lower level offenders.

"We can't get the people we need into the program," he said. "We're trying to break the cycle of criminality."

You can e-mail Herald Staff Writer Amanda Smith-Teutsch at ateutsch@sharonherald.com