Sunday, January 31, 2010
Metro columnist Dan Casey: Saving addicts, saving money
Dan Casey is The Roanoke Times' metro columnist.
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@roanoke.com
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Dan Casey
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Read Dan's blog
The "stars" of a recent documentary produced in the Roanoke Valley are black and white, male and female, older and younger.
They probably look a lot like your friends and neighbors.
What they have in common is that each of their lives spiraled out of control and into crime because of addiction.
Now, each is sober and productive thanks to drug court, a Virginia program that began here and has spread across the commonwealth over the past 15 years.
As certain state lawmakers attempt to cut funding for that program, its graduates are speaking out and telling their stories in "The Arrest is Only the Beginning -- How Virginia Drug Courts Succeed."
The DVD has been distributed to lawmakers in Richmond, and you can watch it at youtube.com/user/ roanokecounty.
n There's the three-decade heroin addict, now in his 50s, who's been in recovery since 2000 and now has a master's degree and works as a drug counselor.
n There's a small-business owner who now employs 12 people. She got into cocaine in her 30s and used to spend weekends alone at home, with the blinds drawn, smoking crack.
n There's the young woman who got hooked as a college student. She's now a registered nurse.
Although their names are on video, those aren't important for this column.
What is important is the story they tell about what saved them from prison and their formerly addicted selves.
It was drug court.
Launched in 1995 by former Circuit Court Judge Diane Strickland, and modeled after other states' efforts, drug court is an interesting fusion of law enforcement and public health.
It gives certain nonviolent offenders who are addicts a chance to avoid prison while the criminal justice system closely monitors drug treatment that lasts at least a year.
Meanwhile, they pay for their treatment, regular drug testing and court costs. Each is required to perform at least 100 hours of public service.
If they graduate, charges against them are dismissed. If they don't, they go to jail.
"There are folks who have this impression that drug court is a boondoggle, that it coddles criminals somehow," says Roanoke Circuit Court Judge Jonathan Apgar, who recently finished a two-year-rotation on the drug court bench.
"This isn't coddling anybody. This is trying to make people have a successful recovery."
There's a benefit to taxpayers as well. It amounts to more than $20,000 per year of incarceration per offender, Strickland notes in the video.
When you consider that our local drug court has 627 successful graduates (the state total is 1,635) those numbers begin to add up.
The fees drug court clients pay, of course, don't cover the full cost of the system, which is administered from Richmond.
It costs state taxpayers just less than $3 million annually to run drug courts in 14 Virginia jurisdictions.
Another 14 jurisdictions are doing it with local funds and donated services, says Anna Powers, Virginia's drug treatment court coordinator. (Richmond funds our local drug court costs at roughly $280,000 annually, Apgar told me.)
But that funding is on the bubble.
For the second year in a row, and during one of the state's worst fiscal crises in recent memory, there are moves afoot in the legislature to cut state money for the drug courts.
One lawmaker who's trying to do it is state Del. Ben Cline, R-Rockbridge County.
Cline and I spoke Friday, and he confirmed he submitted a budget amendment to cancel drug court funding.
Instead, he'd spend that $3 million to reopen the minimum-security Natural Bridge Juvenile Correctional Center. Gov. Tim Kaine ordered that closed last fall in an earlier round of budget trimming. Those kids are now being sent to other more secure juvenile jails.
"My feeling was that, while drug courts are arguably beneficial in some circumstances, these kids are just getting started in life and we can get them on the right track early and give them skills to make them successful members of society," Cline said.
You know things are rotten when the sausage-making in Richmond pits helping wayward youths against helping wayward adults. But that's the ugly reality in any state whose current motto appears to be "never raise taxes."
Watch that video. Listen to those stories.
Decide for yourself: Would society be better off if those drug court graduates were in prison?
Dan Casey's column runs Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday.
