It’s all over except for the appeal, as a special judge has sentenced former Columbus Township Trustee Ben Jackson to 28 years in prison, with two years suspended after the Republican pleaded guilty to 17 felonies and one misdemeanor involving misappropriating funds from the township.
He could have faced up to 64.5 years in prison if the maximum sentence had been imposed.
He pleaded guilty to charges that he stole and misused public funds to cover more than $1.12 million in personal expenses he paid for with the township’s credit card over an eight-year period.
Those included lavish trips across the United States and overseas, college tuition for his children, retail purchases, home improvement projects, among several other things, according to a report by the State Board of Accounts (SBOA).
Looking back on this entire process, a few things come to mind.
First, the state of Indiana needs to take a long, hard look at the township system and its tendency to create fraud opportunities for township officials.
Columbus Township had an “advisory board,” who in the aftermath of Jackson’s arrest, said things like, “we’re an advisory board, we didn’t control the finances,” and “I didn’t even know he (Jackson) had a credit card.”
For the investigation to stop at Jackson is concerning. The township employees who allowed Jackson to pay his own credit card bills for years should be answering some questions, as should the board members who apparently did not notice the hefty increases in credit card payments in the township’s budget for years. For that matter, why didn’t the State Board of Accounts flag these increases as questionable in earlier years?
The money that was stolen was to be used for poor relief, for funding the Columbus Township fire department and for other state-mandated reasons. Jackson’s crime was not just against the township, it affected the entire community.
And the fact Jackson admitted using the money strictly for his own personal benefit and for the benefit of his family, lavish vacations, his children’s college tuition, home improvement projects, his own utility payments, is shocking in its own right.
Why did a special judge allow Jackson to divorce, putting the family’s assets in his now ex-wife’s name, before the criminal case was concluded? Why was this allowed when those assets could have been confiscated as part of the restitution? Why was the family allowed to sell the house and keep the proceeds when township funds had been used for rehab projects on that home and are part of the charges?
“This 28-year sentence reflects the extraordinary scope of the defendant’s greed and the devastating breach of trust he committed against the taxpayers he was elected to serve,” Bartholomew County Prosecutor Lindsey Holden said. “For nearly a decade, he treated public funds as his personal bank account, stealing more than $1 million dollars from the very community that depended on him to act with integrity.”
While the 28-year sentence may seem as justice has been done, Jackson, who is now 57, will likely be in his 70s before he is released from prison, meaning the likelihood of him paying back any significant amount of restitution is questionable.
And that’s another reason the township system needs to have a serious overhaul, or be abolished going forward.
If no one is going to monitor these trustees, including the staff and boards who work within these systems, it’s time for new oversight, or the end of townships altogether.
