Читать книгу Drug Court for Young Offenders: A View from the Bench - Cedric Kerns - Страница 5

Drug Court is fundamentally different from other kinds of courts. The best way to describe it would be that it’s primarily a problem-solving court. In criminal courts, justice is typically considered the appropriate penalty for the crime for which someone is convicted. Most courts take an approach of “This is the crime; this is your punishment. See you later.” Drug Courts have taken a turn away from that approach with regards to what constitutes justice. My belief is that when somebody is sentenced, there needs to be a reason for that form of sentencing in terms of rehabilitation, restitution, punishment, and protection. The “traditional” criminal courts aren’t focused so much on rehabilitation. Their priority is punishment and protection, though I think an effective argument can be made that when defendants are rehabilitated, public protection is increased.

The Drug Court model was initiated about twenty years ago because an incredibly high percentage of criminal acts track back in some way to substance abuse and addiction. The defendants referred to Drug Courts are committing crimes because they have the disease of addiction. Drug Courts have taken the model used in many addiction treatment centers and added criminal justice-related structure and the leverage of potential sanctions. Most treatment programs say to the addicts they treat, “Here are the tools that will help you recover and learn how to live without using mind- and/or mood-altering substances,” and if clients don’t cooperate and use these tools, the program can say, “See you later. You are out of the facility.” But in the courts we say, “Here are the tools, and if you don’t use the tools, we take your freedom away because we not only have to protect you, but we have to protect the community from your actions.”

I would estimate that around 80 percent of criminal offenders abuse alcohol and/or other drugs and perhaps as much as 50 percent of those individuals are addicted. Statistics generally indicate comparable rates of substance abuse and dependence among most groups of individuals involved with the justice system, including juveniles in delinquency proceedings. The vast majority of these individuals return to drug abuse soon after release from incarceration. The goal in Drug Court is to match individuals to specific programs and services that are most likely to improve their outcomes in the most cost-efficient and safety-conscious manner. Evidence of success in Drug Court programs is gauged by reducing recidivism, reducing substance abuse and related dysfunction, and doing so with a better cost-benefit ratio than alternative programs.

The National Association of Drug Court Professionals (NADCP) has developed a set of principles to guide Drug Court philosophy and approach: Principles of Evidence-Based Sentencing and Other Court Dispositions for Substance Abusing Individuals (http://www.nadcp.org/learn/positions-policy-statements-and-resolutions/board-external-policy). As described by NADCP, “evidence-based sentencing relies on scientific data to balance the interests of public safety, cost, and the psychosocial impacts of various dispositions on individuals coming before the courts. Rather than over-apply any one policy, the goal is to match individuals to specific programs and services that are most likely to improve their outcomes in the most cost-efficient and safety-conscious manner.”

In Drug Court we take somebody who is struggling with substance abuse that often rises to the level of addiction and happens to work his or her way into the criminal justice system and we try to give that person the tools that will help him or her get out of the system. A substantial amount of scientific research has demonstrated that Drug Courts are a cost-effective way to reduce both substance abuse and crime. A large amount of research-based information is available on the NADCP website, www.nadcp.org/learn/facts-and-figures. One recent study showed that 75 percent of the people who graduate from Drug Courts do not get rearrested. For every dollar invested in Drug Court, compared to traditional courts, the cost savings related to criminal justice, victimization, and healthcare utilization range from $6.00 to $15.00.

Drug Court judges play a much more hands-on role. In regular court, let’s say it’s a felony court, assuming a plea deal or conviction, the judge sentences the defendant who then goes to the Probation and Parole Division and may never see that judge again. Drug Court defendants see the judge frequently because the judge is there to impose both potential negative and positive sanctions to make sure defendants stay in compliance and do what is being required of them. We say, “Here’s the opportunity. You take it or you don’t. If you don’t, then we take you out of society; and if you do take it, then you can have a much better life.” Drug Court defendants essentially get a choice as to what kind of future they want to have, at least for the near-term.

It’s important to note that Drug Court is an option. We don’t take anyone into our Drug Court unless he or she asks for it. Generally, by the time a defendant gets to Drug Court he or she is saying, “I’ve got a problem. Please help me.” We want people in Drug Court who want help, because that’s the first step. Even if it’s just their way of trying to avoid prison time or jail time, they have to take the step of saying, “I want to be part of this.”

That notwithstanding, we still conduct a formal assessment to identify the severity of a defendant’s substance abuse/addiction. The assessment is not rendered unnecessary by virtue of people saying, “I have a problem that I want help with, and I want to go to Drug Court as opposed to traditional criminal court.” There is a difference between someone who commits crimes to support his or her addiction and a criminal who uses drugs. Drug Courts must have a comprehensive assessment process to weed out the folks who are just trying to avoid incarceration.

Drug Courts have undergone an evolution as far as their “criteria for admission.” Although different courts may have somewhat different parameters regarding what qualifies defendants for their Drug Court, the current model is that Drug Courts take high-need, high-risk defendants. In the early 1990s, Drug Courts tried to take the “sure thing,” basically defendants who were high need, but low risk, so they had very high rates of graduation and recidivism.

The newer approach is based on allocating the resources according to where they can have the greatest impact. If someone is high risk, low need, then when the day is done he or she is much less likely to be in the community committing more crimes. In contrast, if we don’t intervene more intensively with high-risk, high-need defendants, chances are they will commit more and more serious crimes. The reality is that most crime is committed by a small minority of the population. The priority is to address recidivism by working with the individuals who are greater potential risks to the community.

The assessment of defendants as high risk is now fundamental for admission to Drug Court programs, including the Youth Offender (YO), Habitual Offender (HOPE), and Women in Need (WIN) Courts here in the city of Las Vegas. The WIN Court is a specialty Drug Court for high-risk women, most of whom are involved in prostitution to support their addiction. We also have a specialty Drug Court for habitual offenders—individuals who have multiple arrests and have spent considerable time in the system.

In YO Court the defendants are by definition high risk, high need due to their age and developmental stage, adolescence and young adulthood. Recent research shows that the brain’s prefrontal cortex, the seat of decision-making and judgment, isn’t fully developed until after age twenty-four, so our defendants are constitutionally unable to connect their decisions with the potential consequences of those decisions. They can’t weigh their actions against the consequences. All they want to do is have fun and then worry about what the consequences will be later.

How Is the Youth Offender (YO) Court Different from Other Drug Courts?

The court I preside over is the Youth Offender (YO) Court, which is part of the Las Vegas Municipal Court. Municipal Court handles misdemeanors within the cities of Las Vegas, Henderson, and North Las Vegas. District Court handles civil cases, gross misdemeanors, and felonies. When you are in the District Court Drug Court, you go to prison if you fail to comply with court requirements. When you are in the Municipal Court and you fail to comply, the biggest hammer I have is six months in city jail.

Launched in July of 2010, YO Court is a specialty Drug Court for defendants between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four. YO Court was follows an intensive supervision Drug Court model with a focus on treatment and family participation to address the root cause of addiction, and holds young offenders with substance abuse issues and their parent figures accountable, rather than just punishing them.

Young offenders are difficult as a group, but another area in which they are different from other groups of defendants is that they usually have somebody helping them, and it’s normally their parent(s). When I was growing up, at age eighteen you were out of the house. “You’re done. See you later. Good luck. Get rich, and send some money.” But it’s different today. The idea for YO Court came about when I started to tire of sitting in court with kids—young men and women, but really kids—who are twenty-one and twenty-two, and having their parents continuously arguing in favor of them and their actions, trying to defend them, no matter how clear it was that their children were in the wrong. What I witnessed time and again were parents making excuses for their kids’ behavior, finding fault in everything and everyone but their kids.

I described this scenario to a friend who worked in addiction treatment, and he told me, “You know, you are not going to do any good with any of those kids unless you can get to their parents. You’ve got to intervene with their families.” He continued, “You can focus on those kids, but if you don’t get to their families, they are just going right back to the toxic ground that they came from, where they can do no wrong, and where their bad behavior is enabled and supported. And soon they are going to be back in your court or someone else’s.” I recently attended a conference where the presenter cited a study that showed 95 percent of the young people in this age group are likely to relapse after treatment. He followed it up by saying, “However, when a kid goes through treatment and the family members do not, he or she is eleven times more likely to continue using after the relapse.”

What this means is that all of these kids go to treatment and complete it, and then they think, Hey, I’ve made it. I’m good. So they go out and test it, and relapse at extremely high rates. When the family members get sucked back into that kid’s addiction and continue to enable the drug use, then he or she has very little motivation to quit. However, if the family has had the right education and takes the right steps, including setting and enforcing limits vis-à-vis their kid’s drug use, then he or she ultimately realizes, “Wait a minute. I really am out of my element. I truly do have two choices: one is to get clean and demonstrate to my family that I’m changing, and the other is to lose my family because they are not going to sit there and watch me while I continue on the same path.”

We chose to focus on eighteen to twenty-four year-olds for a couple of reasons. One is they are our future, and these are the kids we really need to focus on. I recently received a report from the coroners’ office here in Clark County stating that every week, on average, someone under the age of thirty dies as the result of addiction. One person a week. And that’s only one county. When you put the numbers together across the nation we are talking about an incredible amount of young people whose lives are being wasted at a tremendous cost to society.

There isn’t a single young person in YO Court who doesn’t know at least three people who have died from addiction. When I first started doing this a couple of years ago, I placed a young man in a clean and sober living house, and thought I would go visit. When I went to visit him, I became concerned that this kid could be in real mental health trouble because he had all these funeral announcements on his refrigerator. I thought, This kid is really sick. There is something wrong because he’s got all these morbid announcements. I asked him, “What is this about?” And he said, “Oh, those are all my friends who have died this year.” All of those deaths were related to drug use. Rapidly I went from scared to feeling bad.

So we get these kids in YO Court, and I believe they are the ones our community needs. Our community, and I think other communities, need YO Court. But to be successful, I need to engage the families of our defendants in the criminal justice process, and the addiction treatment and recovery process. The parents of addicts go through various stages: denial of the problem, covering up the problem, lying to others about the problem, and over-functioning to compensate for the under-functioning and irresponsibility of the addict—all of which enables the addict to continue his or her addictive behavior.

YO Court has licensed counselors who conduct full substance use and psychosocial assessments to determine whether or not defendants qualify to participate in our program. They don’t qualify just because they admit they have a problem—they have to suffer from the disease of addiction. It’s essential to make sure that defendants are accurately assessed and placed in the proper form and level of treatment. In this way, criminal justice works hand-in-hand with counseling.

We have a multidisciplinary team that includes a prosecutor, a defense attorney, case managers, counselors, and the judge, of course. Obviously the judge has the final say, but I draw on the team’s opinions and recommendations to come up with the most effective positive or negative sanctions. The judge gets to claim the glory when defendants are successful and graduate, but the truth is the judge rarely makes the call all by him- or herself.

If everyone on the team is going to think and feel the same way I do, then, as the judge, I don’t need them. I can always make the decision. It’s important to have a variety of perspectives. I believe you need to have people from different disciplines who can give you different points of view. Let’s say the assessment comes in, we meet as a team, and we agree, “Okay, that’s our game plan.” And when the defendant strays from the game plan, as a team we meet to decide the best way to handle that deviation. In Drug Courts, it is especially important that judges are well-educated about addiction and have faith in their team. Some team members may recommend jail, some may recommend community service, and some may recommend a writing or other assignment, but we discuss it together and we usually come to a consensus. When there isn’t consensus, as the judge, I make the final call and there is no arguing.

I go with what I think is the right call based on my experience. Once we leave our team meeting, nobody knows there was any dissension regarding the decision. We are all on the same page. And everyone stands behind it. Team members, regardless of their specific role, will stand up and say, “Judge, this is what we want done.” There is rarely an occasion when I deviate from the team’s recommendation. Although we know the recommendation of the team, for the defendants, their families, and other observers, there is a sense of drama as we address violations when court is in session.

Family Participation Is NOT Optional