NORWICH – It was standing-room only during a meeting of the Chenango County Safety & Rules Committee Wednesday where a review of the county’s alternatives to incarceration program was held.

Program board members and staff from Probation, the Sheriff’s Office and Mental Health listened while Laureen J. Clarke, probation director, reviewed the 60-plus page application for 2007.

The specialized drug and alcohol treatment program is designed to inevitably save incarceration costs by enabling more people to be evaluated quicker for treatment and kept out of the county jail. The average length of stay (jail days) for pretrial population has decreased each year from 23.65 in 2003 to 15.5 in 2006.

“Treatment court is working,” Clarke said.

“The jail population looks good,” Sheriff Thomas J. Loughren said. “We have more sentenced prisoners as opposed to court prisoners.”