Louis Troell made some mistakes early on in his life that landed him in jail.

In 2006, when he was 19 and a volunteer firefighter in Kidder Township, Troell and two friends were arrested and charged with arson.He served two years in the Carbon County Correctional Facility for his crime.“When I was incarcerated, I learned a lot about the system and how life really was,” he said. “I learned about a lot of things on how to be a better person, too. So when I got out, I just wanted to be a better person.”Troell had a strong support system in place after being released, which he credits for helping him regain his life.“The transition was hard because I had a mark, a stain and the community only saw that mark or stain instead of the person I was,” he said, noting that he has battled with addiction as well, but has been sober for the past four years. “It all comes down to you and what you want in life. I wanted to be different. I didn’t want to be the same person when I left jail. That’s what it comes down to, you have to want to do it to make the change or you’re not going to.”Troell is now a tow truck operator in Beaver Meadows and has turned his life around for his family.Troell’s story fell hard on a group of agencies gathered at the Carbon County Emergency Management Agency Tuesday morning to work to investigate creating a re-entry program to help people being released from prison as they try to restart their lives outside of their cells.“As you know no offender re-entry program currently exists in Carbon County,” said Carbon County Judge Steven Serfass at the beginning of the meeting. “This is an important first step in determining if a re-entry program is viable in our county considering the many challenges that we are facing. The planning process is vital in developing the necessary details and data that will assist in providing a foundation to formulate a valid reentry plan and also serve as a blueprint to educate the public about the importance of a re-entry plan initiative.“We know the reality is that our jail is fast approaching maximum capacity and without innovative approaches, this is going to be a continuing problem,” he said. “We need to take the problem head-on and deal with the reality as we find it.“Effective re-entry strategies require the active involvement of County-based organizations that can provide services, training, treatment, case management and accountability in the jail setting and especially in the community after incarceration.”The county used a grant obtained from the Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency to hire Melanie Snyder, executive director of Lancaster County’s re-entry coalition and a consultant who works with counties to create re-entry programs, to guide the agencies through the six- to eight-month planning process to see if a program is even a possibility for Carbon.Snyder said that a program like this has shown great results in other counties across the state, noting that in Lancaster, it provides intensive programs and services for reentry into society and 85 percent of the individuals who go through the program are successful in remaining crime free.“The point of the planning process, which we are starting here in Carbon, is that each county needs to figure out what’s needed here and what’s going to work here,” she said, adding that in addition to services, the group will need to look at ways to educate the public and dispel rumors about people who are incarcerated.Tony Harvilla of the Carbon County Sheriff’s office and a driving force in beginning this process, said that the program can work if people want it to work.“We’re trying to reduce the number of people going back to prison, reduce the taxpayers’ costs and keep the community safe and we feel that if we can plug individuals released from prison into the appropriate resources, then we can do that,” he said.The group, which consists of agencies in all areas — from law enforcement to housing, education, volunteers in the correctional facility and drug and alcohol services — talked about some of the needs of the county and where the county is now with resources.The timeline of the project is to work through the strategic plans and create a coalition over the next several months with a completed plan submitted to PCCD for review by March.