 March
6, 2008 -- Baltimore Sun (MD)
Judges See Failure In Fate Of Drug Cases
By Dan Rodricks
What case doesn't have to do with drugs?" a District
Court judge said, suggesting that all crimes alleged on his daily
docket are in some way related to heroin or cocaine addiction.
"So much money is wasted because it's not [politically correct]
to advocate for drug treatment instead of prison time,"
said another jurist. "Politicians want to look tough. But
almost everyone we see needs treatment -- almost every prostitution,
possession and trespassing case."
No one in the room dismissed either statement as exaggeration.
Everyone agreed: Drug addicts need treatment, not incarceration.
Everyone agreed: The system we have now fails big time.
"They commit crimes over and over again because they
haven't received treatment," another judge said of the daily
parade of defendants. "Sometimes they can't make it to court
without using. They come to court high all the time."
The setting was conducive to judicial candor -- a couple of
dozen Baltimore judges assembled for a focus group.
Focus groups are usually used to assess the personalities
of television news anchors or the crunch and flavor of breakfast
cereals. Here was focus on criminal justice in Maryland's biggest
and most drug-infested city, and the participants were judges
of the District Court of Maryland and the Circuit Court of Baltimore,
men and women not otherwise inclined to publicly indict the system
in which they serve.
Advocates for more treatment convened the study: Baltimore
Substance Abuse Systems, which oversees treatment in the city,
and the Justice
Policy Institute, a Washington-based think tank that has
studied Maryland's criminal justice system and concluded that
it has been screwy for years: We spend at most 26 cents on drug
treatment for every dollar spent on incarceration.
Thousands of low-level drug dealers and users, many of them
with nonviolent criminal records, are trapped in a cycle of release,
relapse and recidivism. No wonder our prison population has tripled
since 1980. No wonder that, across the country, one in every
100 adults is incarcerated. We're the world's leading jailer
because we treat drug addiction as a crime and not as a disease.
The JPI and BSAS have agendas, but they wanted to know whether
judges, fresh from the front lines, agreed that jailing drug
defendants amounts to the systemic insanity that anyone with
a lick of common sense can see.
In so many words, the judges agreed.
"As a matter of desperation, you send people to the [Division
of Correction] knowing that they won't get treatment there and
knowing that when they're released you start all over,"
said a Circuit Court judge. (Judges quoted in the JPI study were
not identified.)
"When," asked a District Court judge, "is society
and our government at all levels going to decide that a drug
problem is a health care issue and not a criminal justice issue,
and that the criminal justice community cannot solve this problem?"
Baltimore has had effective drug-treatment courts at the district
and circuit levels for several years. But the conditions for
those courts limit the number of defendants referred to them
to a few hundred at any given time.
Judges can make "8/505/8-507" commitments, meaning
residential treatment under Maryland's Health General Articles
8-505 and 8-507. They also have discretion to refer certain nonviolent
drug addicts to a state-run, federally funded program called
the Felony Diversion Initiative.
But these options are so limited that thousands of other defendants
go through conventional court routines. The judges who sit in
these courts, day after eye-glazing day, have no confidence that
either incarceration or drug treatment as a condition of probation
will do any good. Parole and probation agents are overwhelmed
with cases.
"Even people using 8/505-8/507 and the drug courts are
the minutiae compared to the rest of us who are using Parole
and Probation, giving a suspended sentence and putting the magic
words, 'drug treatment' and 'random urinalysis' on the order,"
a District Court judge said. "We're depending on Parole
and Probation to find treatment, and they're not. Defendants
are not getting the treatment they need -- people addicted five,
10, 20 or 30 years. We're talking about the general population
. falling through a huge sieve."
What to do?
The JPI report makes these suggestions, based on the judicial
focus group:
* Assess defendants' drug treatment needs on the spot, in
the courthouses, and at central booking.
* Judges want to be able to immediately match defendants with
treatment slots, but they don't know what, if anything, is available.
This information needs to be shared with the courts. "Like
a parking lot with the green signs that show how many spaces
are available on each floor," one judge suggested. "We
should know."
* Expand the use of methadone among jail detainees and people
on waiting lists for treatment.
* Expand the drug-treatment court programs and the Felony
Diversion Initiative.
* Hire more public defenders, social workers and staff to
provide more individualized service to defendants who need treatment.
* Raise the state tax on alcoholic beverages for the first
time since 1972 and put the money into drug treatment.
* Reform the state's overly harsh mandatory minimums for low-level,
nonviolent drug users, give judges more discretion in sentencing,
reduce the prison population (by about 5,000 eventually) and
use the savings -- about $26,000 per inmate per year -- to fund
more drug treatment.
Such a reform was vetoed by the governor last year, with Martin
O'Malley saying, "Drug-dealing is a violent crime."
A similar measure, the Smart on Crime Act, is coming through
the legislature again. It's not known whether the wife of our
law-and-order governor took part in the focus group survey, but
Katie O'Malley is a District Court judge; she might suggest that
her husband heed her colleagues' advice.
Back to Dissenting Opinions
of Judges
If you have a Dissenting Opinion of a Federal or State Judge,
please mail or e-mail a copy to:
November Coalition
282 West Astor
Colville, WA 99114
(509) 684-1550
editor@november.org
|
