Drug courts
The TribStar has a nice update on Vigo County’s drug court experiment:
Offenders voluntarily enroll in the program, which requires frequent drug screening, court appearances and intensive rehabilitation. Those who successfully complete the program have their charges dropped.
Judge Barbara Brugnaux helped begin the program in 1996. Since then, 231 participants have graduated, with 35 re-incarcerated after graduation for alcohol or drug-related offenses.
“This is the most positive thing I do in the role of a judge,” Brugnaux said. “The involvement is very personal. We rejoice at successes and despair at relapses.”
Link.
The trouble with drug courts, and the reason we do not see more of them, despite their good statistics (that’s an 85% success rate, so far), is that is looks like you are being too soft on criminals.
Headlines are not grabbed, law enforcement careers are not made, elections are not won, by helping people overcome a serious problem. No, for those things you need 75 people pulled into an undercover drug sting (i.e. Plied into selling their prescription pain medications to an informant), now facing 20-50 years in prison, you need 75 kilo’s of cocaine pulled off the interstate (i.e. Not headed for our home town, not our problem, just our local taxpayers’ being generous with the time of their police forces, helping New York with its drug problem), you need to maintain that lock-em-up and hang-em-high Big Talk that leaves granny facing 50 years in prison for generating some spending money by selling off her pain meds when she could have just taken a gun down to the local gas station, got the cash and only face 20 years in prison.
Plus, if you start solving the drug problem, you put at risk all the high paying jobs in the legal system: Fewer people to prosecute on serious charges = the need for fewer cops, fewer attorneys, fewer judges, fewer probation officers, fewer prison guards, fewer construction workers building new jails and prisons. In fact, Indiana’s drug problem fuels the one industry in this state that is thriving.
