Drug Court: A Better Chance

By Kaylynn What
Criminal Justice Society, Public Relations

"You don't need friends, but somebody that's going to hold your feet to the fire,” Judge Wesley Saint Claire, a Superior Court judge who presides over Drug Court in King County, said of addicts. Yet he offers only mild protest over the practice of giving compliant participants cookies. And while he stated that a picture of someone hugging him, (him! a judge!) is the last thing he needed, the metaphorical hug of Drug Court is exactly what our city needs.

What is drug court? It’s an alternative method of dealing with lawbreakers. It’s “therapeutic jurisprudence,” Judge Saint Claire explained during his recent visit to SU, and it takes a holistic view of the offender. Instead of incarceration, this approach embraces the rehabilitative aspect of punishment. Because so many offenders go to prison, do their time, get out, and then repeat the process over and over, Drug Court came into existence to break that cycle. And it works.

Judge Saint Claire was adamant in getting his audience to understand that if a person has a problem with substance abuse, you have to deal with the underlying issues, or else that person will just keep cycling through the system. If a person’s crime is associated with substance abuse, Drug Court can intervene in an appropriate fashion.

Co-occurring problems need to be dealt with simultaneously, not sequentially or concurrently in separate realms, and this is where the beauty of Drug Court exists. The participants in Drug Court tend to have not only chemical dependencies but mental health issues as well. Traditionally, these two things are treated separately, but Drug Court has the power to force two social sciences to work together and act in a related, collaborative process.

Drug Court operates on a pre-adjudication model. Prosecutors screen for eligibility and refer people to Drug Court for arraignment. A candidate is put in a test program, and their mental health issues are evaluated. The candidate then spends four weeks in treatment. If there is a reasonable belief of success, the candidate can then opt for Drug Court.

To participate in Drug Court, the candidate at this point must sign a waiver, which means he or she gives up the right to trial. The person then spends a minimum of ten months in treatment, attending support meetings and taking two random drug tests per week. If the participant makes it through this, then he or she graduates the program and their charge is dismissed.

A participant isn’t kicked out of the program the first time they get a hot U.A. There is some leeway involved, Judge Saint Claire explained, amounting to various slaps on the hand in a graduated sanction grid. An offender might have to spend a day sitting on a jury box, or, in worse situations, have to spend some time in jail. Of course the chances are not unlimited. When a person stops moving forward, they end up back in front of Judge Saint Claire, who sentences them to as many as 120 months in jail. But that situation is happening less and less, because the program is constantly gaining in success.

The reason for the success, Judge Saint Claire seemed to believe, was the little things like cookies. His goal is to teach the participants respect by giving them respect. Everyone is addressed in a formal manner, a small thing that means a lot to the participants. Each participant has to see the judge once a month, and if they are complying with the program, they are greeted by applause and given a cookie. While talking about it as a silly gesture that he could do without, Judge Saint Claire knows how much this means to participants, because they tell him.

Drug Court is a warm fuzzy sort of social work that many look down on, but Judge Saint Claire overrules this by pointing to the numbers. First, it’s important to note how the program came to be in King County. The late Norm Maleng championed it, (a Republican, if you’ll remember) and created a way for the program to make sense economically. All of the money that is saved on incarceration by sending a person to treatment goes back into a separate account for the program itself. This number was $1.6 million in 2007. Not only does it fund itself, but Drug Court ends up saving the community money. For every dollar spent on it today, Judge Saint Claire said (citing his number crunchers), we save $8-10 tomorrow.

Of course there is still room to grow. Right now the program provides for drug treatment, mental health care, some dental services, and for those that needed it, sober housing. But the program does not have the resources to provide education or employment training. Judge Saint Claire mentioned the Delancey Street Foundation as the model Drug Court wants to recreate itself as, and King County has already sent envoys to California to learn more. Hopefully, a similar program is in our future.

Judge Wesley Saint Claire, of King County Superior Court, gave a presentation Thursday, January 31, at the request of the Criminal Justice Society. To find out more about CJS, please visit: criminaljusticesociety.org.