This week’s Hometown Hero, presented by Hendrick Southpoint, is Caitlin Fenhagen from the Orange County criminal justice resource department.

Fenhagen is Orange County’s criminal justice resource director, the first person ever to hold that position. And in that role, she’s been responsible for a number of significant new programs, including a misdemeanor diversion program, which enabled young people to pay off minor offenses without having those offenses go on their criminal records.

“We’ve been working on trying to create a program like that for a good bit of time,” said assistant district attorney Jeff Nieman.

Fenhagen also oversees the county’s pretrial release supervision program, a way for the county to avoid keeping people in jail unnecessarily for crimes they haven’t been convicted of yet.

Fenhagen (middle, center) pictured with the Orange County Criminal Justice Resource Department staff.

Nieman said it’s an important program, especially now because of the coronavirus pandemic.

“It’s extremely important,” he said, “and this is a statewide and nationwide thing is trying to reduce jail and prison populations. Well, that plays right into what Caitlin’s office does too.”

In addition to that, Fenhagen also helped create a full time attorney position in the Orange County court system to work specifically on driver license restoration, to help people who have had their driver’s licenses revoked for being financially unable to pay a ticket and get those licenses restored.

“I think we might be the first in the state to actually have a county-funded, full time position to do driver’s license restoration,” Nieman said. “I think Caitlin’s office gets a lot of credit for creating that.”

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