Calling addiction a treatable disease, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie says he would require treatment for nonviolent criminals with drug dependence...
Read full entry »Asked about drug treatment behind bars, New York State's Attica prison told former federal drug czar spokesman Robert Weiner and Daphne Baille of Treatment Alternatives for Safe Communities, "We're not a drug prison." Respond Weiner and Baille: "Every prison needs to be a 'drug' prison that provides treatment. Only then will we end the overcrowding and recidivism," they say in a Chicago Sun-Times op-ed article.
Though 68 percent of arrestees test positive for drugs, only 14 percent of prisoners receive treatment, Weiner and Baille say. The President's National Commission on Fiscal Reform, usually called the Deficit Commission, is scheduled to recommend ways to lower the deficit after the November elections. Expanded drug treatment for offenders, say Weiner and Baille, would take the proverbial "bite out of crime." It would reverse overcrowding, reduce crime and recidivism and help federal, state and local budgets. Congress should double the $5 billion budgeted for all treatment and prevention, in and out of prison, say the authors, citing a UCLA study saying, for every dollar invested in treatment, taxpayers save $7 in reduced crime and other benefits.
Read full entry »Nearly every murder, fistfight and rape at the Pine Ridge Reservation starts with a drink. Would lifting the ban on reservation liquor sales make a difference?
Sgt. Kevin Rascher turns his cruiser onto the gravel in South Dakota Indian Country, guns the engine, and races toward an emergency call 20 miles away. The Chevy Tahoe bounces down the back road at 95 mph, sirens howling, past gutted cars and broken beer bottles.
Another drinker. Another fight. Rascher’s shift on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation began two hours ago, and the tribal highway officer has already arrested four Indians on alcohol charges.
Jesse Runs Against 19 stands outside of a home in Manderson, SD. The remoteness of Pine Ridge Indian Reservation and its housing clusters can leave youth isolated with not much to do. (Conrad Schmidt)
Alcoholism strikes four out of five families in the nation’s second-poorest county, despite a ban as old as the reservation itself. Police say nearly every murder, fistfight and rape on the Connecticut-sized tribal tract begins with a drink.
Rascher rolls into a tattered neighborhood in Kyle, a reservation town. Through the dust-caked windshield, he spots a suspect.
A man with a shaved head staggers through the cluster of houses, his gray shirt torn and specked with blood. A young girl and boy watch, frozen, as he stumbles into their yard.
‘A HUGE PROBLEM’
Few places in America are as scarred as Pine Ridge, a sunburnt expanse of sand hills and buttes that crumble into the Badlands.
The Oglala band of the Lakota nation, known to outsiders as the Sioux, live today in some of the nation’s worst poverty conditions. The Pine Ridge prairie landscape is scattered with junk cars, rotting trailers and graffiti-laced, 1970s-era federal housing. Beat-up vans rumble down bumpy roads, past sickly dogs and toddlers in the street.
Unemployment hovers around 80 percent, according to tribal census figures, and one-third of those with jobs live below the federal poverty line. Teenagers commit suicide at a rate nearly twice the national average. Life expectancy is lowest in the northern hemisphere, except for Haiti. One in three women have been raped.
Police blame alcohol for many of the problems, but the debate has raged on Pine Ridge for years. Advocates who want to legalize alcohol say the tribal ban buries police in simple possession cases and creates a forbidden allure that encourages binge drinking. Others say lifting the ban would worsen the tribe’s long, ugly struggle with alcohol.
Tribal council candidate Denver American Horse says he will push for a ballot measure if elected in November.
“I’ve always had a lot of faith and confidence in the tribal members,” says American Horse, who stopped drinking 22 years ago. “I feel they can handle alcohol if it’s legalized.”
Alcohol possession arrests inundate the short-staffed, high-turnover tribal police department. The current certified force of 42 would need to at least double before the department could serve all of the reservation’s needs, says Oglala Sioux Public Safety Director Everett Little Whiteman. The alcohol ban is “not working, and has never worked,” Little Whiteman says.
Ninety percent of the 25,000 adult trials and arraignments scheduled next year in tribal court are alcohol-related, and juvenile crime is expected to generate an additional 10,000 cases, says Marwin Smith, the reservation’s attorney general. . Parents, spouses and children endure most of the violence.
Smith says legalizing alcohol would likely not reduce his caseload, but would free police and the courts to focus on more serious offenses. As a tribal council appointee, however, he has remained publicly neutral on the legalization debate. Of the five tribal prosecutors, Smith is the only licensed lawyer.
BOOTLEGGERS
Rascher jumps out of his cruiser and sprints toward the man in the yard. The man turns, stares, and steps back. He twists away when Rascher grabs his left arm, but not quick enough.
Rascher cuffs his catch and loads him into the right-rear passenger seat. His name is Alan Has No Horse – A-Town to his friends – and, allegedly, he punched his brother. Blood seeps from his swollen lower lip. Rascher suspects he is high on methamphetamine, probably drunk.
Somebody stares from a window a few houses down. Bootlegger, Rascher says. Illegal peddlers thrive in the limp economy. Locals who can’t find a seller will drive as far as 60 miles one way for alcohol.
“Legalizing would help, but it would not help at the same time,” Rascher says. “I think it would help as far as the DUIs and car accidents. The ones who (want) alcohol will drive to a border town to buy it, but then they don’t want to wait until they get back to their house to drink. They start drinking in the car.”
Intoxicated men wander the streets looking for a friend with more beer after sunset in White Clay, NE. Fresh sugary does not stop an addict from reaching White Clay, NE for beers with friends. (Conrad Schmidt)
Rascher says lifting the ban would likely increase the number of domestic fights, rapes, assaults and suicides on Pine Ridge.
A few months ago, Rascher stopped a car in the reservation town of Wanblee. In the back, he found a box with 48 travel-sized bottles of Tvarscki 100-proof vodka.
The driver admitted that he bought the box for $120, or $2.50 per bottle, Rascher says.
If other bootleggers in town have alcohol, the driver told him, he peddles the bottles for $5 apiece and a $120 net profit. When competitors run out, he sells them for $10 and takes home $360.
A WAY OF LIFE
Belleron Blue Bird Jr. moans on the gurney and tugs against his wrist restraints. Blood trickles from the crescent-shaped gash above his right eye, down his cheek, and drips on the ambulance floor.
A medic, Neil Phair, wraps his head in gauze. Blue Bird, a skinny 25-year-old with a buzz cut, mustache and “Native Pride” inked on his arm, grimaces when asked what happened.
A fight, he mumbles. Hit with a wooden bat. Been drinking. But I’m tough!
Phair rolls his eyes. It’s 3 a.m. The night so far is slow – one stabbing, two hours earlier – and this call, like most others, began with a beer.
“It becomes a way of life,” Phair says. “They expect it. They’re ready for it. An ambulance showing up at the house is normal.”
The worst drinkers are so addicted, Phair says, that emergency responders adhere to a general rule of thumb. Those who blow above a .450 on a breathalyzer – more than five times the South Dakota driving limit – go to the hospital. Anyone with a lower reading and no other problems goes to jail. Some regulars are known to suffer withdrawal seizures if their level drops below .200.
The ambulance tears down the wind-swept highway at 105 mph, toward Pine Ridge Hospital. Blue Bird bounces on the gurney, clenches his jaw, and closes his eyes.
THE BORDER
Albert Brave Jr. swigs from a black-and-red malt liquor can, a 24-ounce brew with twice the alcohol of a typical beer.
The 46-year-old leaves his reservation home almost daily to wander the dirty border town two miles south of Pine Ridge village. Two women join him on a grocery cart turned on its side. Last night, he says, he slept in the tribal jail.
Whiteclay, Nebraska is a bump-in-the-road prairie town with fewer than two dozen residents, 200 feet south of the reservation border. The main drag leads motorists past a faith ministry, a pawn shop, three grocery stores and four off-sale beer stores that sold 4.6 million cans of beer last year, mostly to Indians. Authorities say Whiteclay feeds the alcoholism and violence on Pine Ridge more than any other town.
Indians slump on doorsteps with worn-leather faces and bloodshot eyes. A graying Native American woman in a T-shirt and dirty jeans lies curled on the sidewalk. Tumbleweeds and a Wal-Mart bag skitter across the road.
Few here are homeless. The regulars of Whiteclay come simply to drink, loiter, laugh, fight, hustle change, and forget their lives. Every Monday through Saturday, they arrive at 8 a.m. for “roll call.” A local faith ministry serves breakfast. Then, drinks. The crowd grows. Two men sneak their booze into a gutted house with a filthy mattress and human excrement on the floor.
Jolene Black Elk points to the scar on her neck, an inch from her windpipe, where she says her boyfriend stabbed her in an alcohol-fueled rage. She talks about her teenage years on “the rez,” drinking and drugging, and the night she was raped. As night descends on Whiteclay, she warns a writer and photographer to stay close: “You guys are gonna get ganged.”
Mike New Holy, a former tribal police officer, slouches on the porch of an empty house with boarded windows. Behind him, in spray-painted blue, are the words, “Live Long. Native Pride.”
The 45-year-old says he arrived in Whiteclay the day before, slept in the grass behind an empty house, and woke up to drink again. By mid-afternoon, he says, he had finished three joints and two beers.
“Look at it,” New Holy says, and nods toward the beer stores. “Everybody’s coming down and buying the booze over there, then they go back and bootleg it. They make money off it.”
Marilyn Lee Sitspoor spent last night in the Pine Ridge tribal offender facility. Her drunken boyfriend kicked her out of bed, she says. A fight ensued, the police arrived, and they both went to jail.
Sitspoor eases herself down, against a grocery store wall. The former dental assistant has come here occasionally since she lost her job and her boy. Her 16-year-old son, Stu, was struck and killed by an unknown motorist in July 2004.
“I’m lonely,” she says. “I miss my baby.”
She stops. Her chin trembles. Flies swirl around her as she reaches for a crumpled tissue. Here, alone in the dirt, the Lakota grandmother lowers her head and cries.
‘THIS PLACE AIN’T NORMAL’
State Line Liquor is a metal shack with beer. Outside, a January snow swirls through Whiteclay, past the store’s brown walls and the horse-tie rack out front. Inside, behind the counter, Gary Brehmer waits.
The door swivels open. A stocky, round-faced Indian, someone Brehmer knows, struts inside and slaps the counter.
“Gimme a Black Ice.”
Brehmer balls his fist, pulls it back, pauses. And grins.
“Oh, a Black Ice?” he says. “I thought you said a black eye.”
Two minutes later, the door opens again. The next customer dumps 100-some pennies on the counter and demands a 24-ounce malt liquor.
“It’s $1.50,” Bremer says. “Now, if you want me to get it, that’ll cost you $4.”
In walks a man with tangled black hair, a worn denim jacket and rotten teeth. “I want someone to tell me who the toughest fucking dude in Whiteclay is.”
Brehmer squints, leans forward. “You’re looking at him.”
The banter continues for a straight half-hour, different jokes but the same basic request: A six-pack. Two cans of Joose. A Hurricane High Gravity, some smokes, and a lottery ticket.
State Line sold an estimated 42,200 beer cases in 2009 and still ranks among the smallest operations in Whiteclay, according to the Nebraska Liquor Commission. Brehmer started in town as an auto shop owner. The avid hunter bought a neighbor store’s liquor license in the early 2000s, and let his two sons run the shop on weekdays.
The 57-year-old moved to the Pine Ridge area when he was 5. His father, who worked in construction, enrolled him in a reservation school. Classmates beat him because he was a wasicu, Lakota for white person, which in some circles means “one who steals the fat.”
Despite the problems, Brehmer says, Pine Ridge has plenty of quiet, law-abiding people. The troublemakers steal the attention, he says, and Whiteclay businesses get blamed.
“If I don’t (sell liquor), the next guy will,” he says. “I’m going to have to answer to God, too. At least we can control it. If somebody comes in, and they’ve had enough, or if they drop out there and start rolling around on the street, we go out there and we call the law. We do the best we can.”
The door creaks. A fresh customer breaks his thought. Brehmer recognizes the man, sees his middle finger, and returns the gesture.
“You don’t do this in a normal place,” he says. “But this place ain’t normal.”
A TROUBLED HISTORY
The ban dates to 1832, when Congress prohibited alcohol sales to all American Indians. President Dwight D. Eisenhower repealed the law in 1953, but Pine Ridge, like most reservations, continued to forbid alcohol.
Whiteclay belonged to the Lakota under an 1868 treaty with the U.S. government, as did the western Dakotas, most of Nebraska and parts of Montana and Wyoming.
Pine Ridge was created in 1889, when Congress shrank the Great Sioux Reservation into five separate land tracts. Lawmakers incorporated a 10-mile-long, 5-mile-deep buffer zone, the Whiteclay extension, into the reservation to protect Pine Ridge from illegal whiskey peddlers.
In 1904, over the protests of Lakota elders, President Theodore Roosevelt placed all but one square mile back in the public domain.
White settlers pounced. Bootleggers sold to Indians in Whiteclay until the 1950s, when the state of Nebraska licensed two bars. In the early 1970s, the owners converted to off-site sales only, in response to worsening violence. The state licensed two more.
Nebraska has reaped the cash windfall for years. In 2009, according to state liquor commission, Whiteclay generated $133,700 in alcohol-tax revenue for state coffers.
Nebraska State Sen. LeRoy Louden introduced a bill in January that would have let the Pine Ridge tribal government apply for up to 70 percent of the money generated by the liquor tax each year for health care, public safety and economic development. In 2009, had the bill been law, Pine Ridge could have qualified for $94,500 in financial aid.
But the version rewritten in committee and signed into law instead allows only a one-time payment of $25,000 from the state general fund. The Nebraska Commission on Indian Affairs is required to seek private and public money to help the tribe, until the law sunsets in 2018.
THE JAIL
There is one time every year when car crashes rise, assaults surge and the tribal jail floods with drunken offenders.
The Pine Ridge Detention located in Pine Ridge, SD fills up with intocicated persons. Each night the jail fills and each offender of intoxication serves 8 hours and leaves. (Conrad Schmidt)
The Oglala Sioux Nation’s Annual Powwow is the Pine Ridge equivalent of a state fair, a four-day celebration of Indian pride.
Outside, in a dance circle lined with pine branches, young men and women sway and spin to a thunderous drum. A teen dancer ducks and pivots, arms wide, in a feather headdress with a choker and a long-bone breastplate. A wailing, prideful Lakota chant fills the August air.
Half a mile east, in the old Pine Ridge Jail, a guard ushers a one-eyed inmate to his cell. Public intox. A 10-man line snakes from the processing desk to the booking garage. New inmates enter every five minutes, consistently, for an hour straight.
Muffled shouts echo from the holding cells, each with at least a dozen passed-out inmates. A bare-chested, gray-haired man peeks through a window, his belly sagging over his belt. A woman hammers on her door. The block reeks of alcohol, urine, body odor.
Bobby Brown Eyes, a jail trustee, drags a mop past the intake desk. The 19-year-old was arrested three days ago for driving under the influence and disorderly conduct. Two of his buddies are in the holding tank, and a third just arrived.
“Out there, you can’t get nothing,” he says. “You have to get up early, you have to clean, you have to make your bed. Here, you can stay up all night.”
Brown Eyes has worn the black-and-white striped jail suit before. In years past, the 19-year-old served time for public drunkenness, failing to pay a driving-under-the-influence fine, and at least one fight. The trustee job pays $10 a day toward his $35 bond.
The next night, a full day after his release, Brown Eyes roams the grounds with a cigarette between his lips. John Lennon stares from the T-shirt on his gangly, boyish frame.
Tonight, he says, he is looking for his five-month-old and her mother. His ex is with another man now, and Brown Eyes wants a fight.
“Going to get high tonight,” he says. “Probably go drinking.”
THE DEBATE
The Oglala Sioux Tribal Council last considered a ballot issue to legalize alcohol in January 2004, to fatten their tax base and fund treatment programs. The idea died a month later after a public outcry.
Among the supporters was Garry Janis, a former county sheriff, who tried to lift the ban during his time on the council.
“You legalize it, you open up a tribal bar, and you can take the money and put it back into social programs,” Janis says. “It’s here regardless. We spend thousands of dollars in resources combating it, and it doesn’t have to be that way.”
Council member Joseph Rosales says he supports the ban because alcoholism plagues too many of his constituents.
Tribe members who once settled for beer now drink vodka, he says. Others who can’t afford it will drink hair spray, mouthwash, household cleaners, anything with alcohol.
“Our nation’s in a state of denial about the fact that we have a problem,” says Rosales, an alcoholic now 11 years sober. “Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe if we do legalize it, we can use the money for a treatment center or something else. But I seriously doubt it will help.”
Pine Ridge passed a law to legalize alcohol in 1970. Two months later, a conservative tribal council dominated by Oglala elders restored the ban.
Roughly one-third of America’s 334 Indian nations still ban alcohol. The results of legalization vary by tribe and policy, says Oregon Health and Science University researcher Anne E. Kovas.
Alcohol-related deaths on Wyoming’s Wind River Reservation doubled in the 1970s, after the tribe lifted its ban. But other studies show a drop in mortality rates on reservations that legalized, Kovas says.
America’s largest tribal nation, the 180,000-member Navajo Reservation, forbids alcohol except with food orders at casino restaurants. The policy was enacted in 2002 to attract tourists. Few people support full legalization, says George Hardeen, a spokesman for Navajo Nation President Joe Shirley Jr.
Pine Ridge’s closest neighbor, the 21,000-member Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota, legalized alcohol sales and possession in 1973.
The Rosebud Sioux Tribal Police Department still receives 25,000 emergency calls per year, about as many as Pine Ridge. But Rosebud Police Capt. Edwin Young says many alcohol cases end peacefully, with an order to leave or an open-container ticket.
A FAMILY, A FIGHT
Dave Glenn lifts his shirt to show the pale, dime-sized spot on his stomach where he was shot.
The 58-year-old Oglala served in Vietnam as a platoon minesweeper, He nearly died when a bullet tore through his intestines. Now, the mechanic with a silver ponytail and bifocals fixes transmissions and tries to survive.
A television hums in the cramped, unkempt, smoke-filled bedroom. Mold spots and black-marker drawings cover the wall. Glenn’s granddaughter, a toddler, squirms into his lap.
“Hiya, monkey!” he says. “This is my monkey, my baby.”
In Lakota, there is a concept – tiyospaye – that requires families to take care of their own. Cousins, sisters, half-brothers, grandparents and friends squeeze into homes that can barely hold a family of four.
Mandy Janis plucks the girl out of Grandpa Dave’s lap, kisses her cheek. Her family moved back to Pine Ridge in August 2009, after a decade in Rapid City. Her husband, Danny Jumping Eagle, works construction for $15,000 a year and mops floors part-time at Big Bat’s convenience store in Pine Ridge. Four of her six children still live at home.
Glenn’s son, Sheldon, walks into the bedroom with a beer. His eyes are glazed, and he scowls at the sight of his father and a visitor.
“It’s about time you guys got out of my fucking room.”
“You ain’t got no fucking room here,” Glenn says, and points outside. “You’re a worthless fucking drunk. Your room’s out there.”
“Get out of my room,” Sheldon says, his words slurred. “Get. Out.”
In the next room, Bruce Bad Milk sits on an unmade bed and sings a deep-throated Lakota hymn. Janis and three other women sip beer at the kitchen table. On the floor, in a pile of dirty clothes, lies a sleeping Lakota baby.
Sheldon storms into the living room and grabs another beer. Glenn follows him, and the shouting grows louder, a chorus of slurred expletives.
“Fuck you,” Sheldon says.
“Hey, shut up,” Glenn says. “Get your ass out of here.”
Glenn lunges forward and pushes his son. Sheldon flops forward, over the wooden stove, and smacks the floor.
Somebody laughs. The children stare. Sheldon looks up at his father, his face contorted, his eyes welling with tears. Slowly he stands, clutches his hat, and stalks off to the bedroom.
Outside, beyond the dirt yard and barking dogs, in the world where alcohol is banned, a quiet settles over Pine Ridge. A lone police cruiser speeds through town, turns a corner, and disappears into the dark.
Grant Schulte is a reporter for The Des Moines Register and a correspondent for USA Today. He was a 2010 winner of the John Jay Center on Media, Crime and Justice /McCormick Foundation Fellowship on tribal justice reporting.
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In 1935, the United States opened the first federal prison to house convicted drug addicts. The "Narcotic Farm" in Lexington, Kentucky soon became an epicenter for drug treatment and addiction research. For forty years it was alsothe gathering place for this country’s growing drug subculture.
Find out more about the the book and accompanying documentary here.
Use the Crime Report for more information on Drugs.
Read full entry »The federal drug czar's office has awarded $22 million in new grants to 185 programs under the Drug Free Communities Support Program. Gil Kerlikowske, director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, also announced $63 million in continuation grants to 549 programs. The grants provide community coalitions support to prevent and reduce youth substance use.
The federal program provides grants of up to $625,000 over five years to community coalitions that facilitate citizen participation in local youth drug prevention efforts, including prescription drug diversion and prevention initiatives and underage drinking programs. The new grantees were selected from 521 applicants through a competitive process. For more information about the grant-winners: http://www.whitehousedrugpolicy.gov/dfc/files/2010_new_awards.pdf
Read full entry »One of the more troubling issues I have encountered in my 15 years of the practice of psychiatry is the frequency with which agencies work to evade responsibility and accountability for the clients they are supposed to serve. No agency is immune to this problem, but in my experience, one of the most egregious situations goes something like this:
Joe is a 33 year old man seen on the grounds of a local elementary school. He is not recognized by school staff, and the police are called. Upon approach by police officers, he appears not to understand their direction to leave the grounds.
Instead, he approaches the playground area where the kindergarten class is currently playing. The police officers take hold of his arms, at which point Joe begins screaming and fighting to extricate himself from their hold. He is charged with trespassing on school grounds, resisting arrest, and two counts of assault on a law enforcement officer.
Upon entry into central booking, Joe does not answer any questions, instead sitting rocking on the bench. Other arrestees tell detention staff “there’s somethin’ wrong with that dude – he’s crazy!” Joe is referred for an urgent mental health assessment, where he stares over the evaluator’s head as if seeing someone behind the clinician. He is placed in the mental health area of the booking center and a psychiatrist is called. The psychiatrist diagnoses Joe with schizophrenia and orders antipsychotic medication, which Joe refuses. When taken for his bail review three days after his arrest, the court orders a competency assessment, and Joe is placed on the list for a forensic psychiatric evaluation.
When seen for the evaluation at the court clinic, Joe is still generally silent, but at times he echoes the last words of the questions posed to him. He is found by the forensic evaluator to be incompetent to stand trial, and he is committed to the hospital for treatment and restoration to competency. During his stay at the hospital, staff eventually are able to engage Joe sufficiently to track down Joe’s mother, who reports that “Joe was always a bit off. He was in special education classes at the school where he got arrested.” When records from the school system are sought, the hospital staff are told “FERPA requires us to destroy special education records after 5 years.”
What is Joe’s real diagnosis? It appears that instead of schizophrenia, Joe has a developmental disorder such as autism or a similar pervasive developmental disorder. These types of disorders require very different treatment and rehabilitation approaches from the more familiar mental illnesses like schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. Typically, mental illnesses respond to medications, while the developmental disorders require a more comprehensive behavioral approach.
More problematic is the system of care. In many – perhaps most – states, one agency is responsible for the care of people with mental illness, and another is responsible for people with developmental disabilities such as autism or intellectual disabilities (formerly known as “mental retardation”). Whereas people with mental illness can be hospitalized urgently if they meet civil commitment criteria (problem enough, as discussed in my June blog entry), those with developmental disabilities must prove that they are sufficiently impaired and that the impairment began in childhood before benefits are provided. As the vignette illustrates, the childhood origin can be difficult to prove even when it is known where the individual attended school; it is often impossible to get even this information, if the person is unable to communicate or if he is from another country. Thus, individuals who really require a behavioral approach to remedy or address their deficits end up in a psychiatric system that cannot say no, that is ill-equipped to manage them, and they are often inappropriately treated with medications that cannot be effective and that only lead to adverse effects over time.
I have consulted on cases and systems in many states, and I always hear the same thing: “How can we get these agencies to coordinate better?”
Erik Roskes is a forensic psychiatrist and currently the Director of Forensic Services at the Springfield Hospital Center in Maryland. The opinions expressed are those of the author only, and do not represent those of any of Dr. Roskes’ employers or consultees, including the Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. He can be found at http://mysite.verizon.net/eroskes/
Read full entry »Attorney General Eric Holder, speaking in Boston yesterday at the nation’s largest conference on drugs and crime, said drug courts play a key role in rehabilitating addicts and reducing crime and should be available to more people, especially juveniles, the Boston Globe reports. “At my Justice Department this is a top priority,’’ Holder told the National Association of Drug Court Professionals. “You have proven that redemption and rehabilitation are possible.’’
Drug courts, first established in Miami in 1989 and now operating in every state, give those arrested a last chance to stay out of jail by committing to treatment under intense court supervision. Holder said there is lower recidivism among those who graduate from drug court and that more money needs to be allocated for additional drug courts. “I believe that we can put drug courts within reach of every person who needs them, and I am confident that we can,’’ he said.
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The problems of mentally ill offenders really start once they leave prison
Five years after Victor left New York’s Downstate Correctional Facility, he tried to kill himself by drinking a container of bleach.
It was July 2006, and the 43-year-old Bronx resident had just lost his third job. Believing that he would never be able to make a living, and feeling that his family had lost hope in him, he considered suicide the only option left to him.
“Some days I thought I was invincible, like I couldn’t be touched,” he recalls. “I couldn’t control my temper. One minute I’m all right, the next I’m real angry. I don’t know what’s going to happen to me or what I’m going to do day to day, second to second.”
Victor, who asked not to use his last name, has been diagnosed with depression and bi-polar disorder. But in three separate stints behind bars, all of them for drug-related offenses, his illness has never been treated.
If anything, the prisons dealt with the symptoms—rather than the man himself. At Downstate, where he spent seven years, Victor lived out much of his sentence in the special housing isolation unit, where he said he landed after repeated fights with other inmates and guards.
For such prisoners, release without the promise of any hope of medical attention amounts to a kind of sentence itself.
More than 16 percent of state prison inmates have a mental illness, according to the Department of Justice. Compared to the general population, four times as many men and eight times as many women in jail suffer from a mental illness.
‘The Next Criminal Justice Challenge’
Eugene O’Donnell, a former New York City police officer and prosecutor, calls the growing number of mentally ill inmates released into the community “potentially the next big criminal justice challenge.”
“We need a major strategy to deal with this, and I don’t see that happening,” says O’Donnell, who now teaches at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Mentally ill inmates leaving prison face many of the same challenges reintegrating into society as other released prisoners, such as lack of housing and marketable job skills. But psychiatrists and other specialists say their problems are exacerbated by the stigma of their illness, their need for consistent medial treatment and their difficulty accessing community services.
“They are often triply stigmatized,” says Dr. Merrill Rotter, a forensic psychiatrist who has studied re-entry among mentally ill ex-offenders. “Because of their mental illness, they are seen as dangerous when they may or may not be; the vast majority of the mentally ill in the criminal justice system are substance abusers; then there’s the third stigma of having been in prison.”
Department of Justice surveys suggest that, once in prison, mentally ill offenders are more likely to be victims of physical and sexual abuse than other inmates—and misunderstanding or misdiagnosis of their problems often lands them longer prison sentences or turns them into repeat offenders.
The lack of treatment and attention paid to the special needs of mentally ill offenders has triggered a federal lawsuit in New York, which charges that prisoners with psychiatric disabilities are the victims of “revolving door” justice.
Without adequate support, medical treatment and accommodations once they get out, they are often re-arrested for the same acting-out behavior – or worse – that landed them in prison in the first place.
Activists in several other states, including Ohio, have filed similar lawsuits seeking to force the government to provide greater assistance to prisoners with mental illness as they leave prison. Although New York’s prisons have a pre-release planning program for mentally ill inmates, the lawsuit alleges that it is far too small. Talks have been underway on a settlement for the last two years. Spokespersons for the state division of parole and the New York Attorney General’s Office, which are defendants in the suit, declined to comment.
But the statistics are hard to argue with. The mentally ill are more than twice as likely to have their probation or parole revoked, according to a 2009 report from the Council of State Governments. A recent study in Utah found that ex-offenders with serious mental illnesses were re-incarcerated an average of a year earlier than other offenders.
A Life Sentence
“These guys are serving a life sentence, 90 days at a time,” said one parole officer who supervises a group of mentally ill parolees..
There is comparatively little research on what works to reduce recidivism for the mentally ill. But existing studies suggest that a holistic approach has benefits.
“Mental health treatment doesn’t stand out as main defense against recidivism,” says Dr. Frederick Osher, director of health systems and services policy at the Justice Center of the Council of State Governments. “The current thinking is that not all treatment is the same.”
Osher, who has written a guide to improving probation and parole for mentally ill offenders, adds: “Just sending someone to a community health center doesn’t mean that they’re getting the right treatment, in the right dose.”
The story of Debra Edwards, a New York mother of five with bipolar disorder, offers an instructive example.
Edwards, 52, says she had been arrested nine times, mostly for drug related crimes. Like many people with mental illnesses, she self-medicated: heroin when she was up; cocaine when she was down.
Some mornings, she said, she was so depressed she couldn’t get out of bed. Once, she disappeared for three days. She said she felt as if she were underwater, seeing and hearing what was going on around her, but unable to interact with her surroundings. She awoke three days later on a park bench in the Bronx.
During several short stints in jail, including a year in New York’s Rikers Island facility, Edwards said she did not receive any assistance in planning for her release and life outside of jail. She recalled that on the day she was released she felt both happy and depressed at being back outside.
”You know where you’re going – you’re just going back…to your regular life again,” says Edwards.
Within two months, Edwards was indeed back in the same situation. Her drug use increased, and her mental illness left her so feeling so paranoid that she spent most days in bed with her head under the covers. Her next arrest, however, turned out to be her last.
In 2006, a judge placed her in an alternative treatment program. But since the program focused on her addiction rather than her mental illness, it was of limited use—until she discovered a Harlem-based program called Howie the Harp which provides training in basic life and work skills for former offenders with mental illnesses and places them in internships. It turned her life around, she said.
John Williams, program spokesman, said more than 80 percent of Howie the Harp graduates keep a job for at least a year after leaving the program.
“If I had my bi-polar under control, I wouldn’t have been doing drugs,” Edwards says. “We need to find out why we feel the way we feel and not be ashamed of it.”
Meanwhile life on the outside continues to be a struggle for Victor. Although he has managed to avoid prison, he is still without a job. But he believes a little extra help for his illness would have gone a long way.
“For years I said I ain’t got no problems, that there’s nothing wrong with me,” he says. “But I needed a lot of help. If somebody had talked to me about my problems and how to control myself, I think things would have been different for me.”
Scott Michels is a freelance writer in New York City.
This piece is one of a series of original criminal justice journalism projects around the country produced by 2010 John Jay/H.F. Guggenheim Fellows. They were coordinated with editorial input by Joe Domanick, Associate Director of the John Jay College Center on Media, Crime and Justice. We thank the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation for their generous support of this project.
Photo by Pacha Mama Photography via Flickr.
Read full entry »Pantagraph reporter Edith Brady-Lunny was a 2010 John Jay/H.F. Guggenheim Fellow. She explains her techniques of reporting the story.
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There has been much talk of closing prisons here in Texas. The Crime Report covered that issue a week or so ago, and the local paper has also written about it. From what I've read, the move seems budgetary rather than a result of some philosophical shift, and as I sit down to contemplate the subject a case that came up in court this week seems like a good representation of how I feel.
Several years ago, a couple of guys arrived at a business here in Austin and robbed it at gunpoint, tying up the proprietor, who was terrified beyond belief. A woman drove the getaway car, but did not go in. They were caught and the gunmen got prison, she got probation. This week, she was before the court because, not for the first time, she’d violated the terms of her probation by using an illegal substance. Each time, she’d been continued on probation rather than having it revoked and being sent to prison. Mostly because the violations weren’t that bad, the minimum prison term for her is five years, she has several children, and is pregnant with another. Today, she wept and told the court that she’d smoked weed, yes, but done it because when she smoked the beatings she got from the man she lived with hurt less. A made-up story for sympathy? Sounds like it, except she went to SafePlace (a shelter for abused women) and told them the same thing before being picked up for the probation violation. As frustrated as we might have been with the violation, she bought some sympathy and credibility by her admission, and by her admission that she wanted treatment for her drug use
So it became a stark choice: either she gets prison for a bad act followed by repeated failures to abide by probation conditions, or she is left on probation in the hope that the reasons (or excuses, depending on your perspective) stop. I think it’s fair to say that most of us (except the defense lawyer, I guess) were tired of excuses, aware of the serious underlying offense, and starting to wonder if it was impossible to make someone take hold of their life and turn it around. But we all agreed, ultimately, that this time prison wasn’t the answer so she was sent to in-patient treatment for her repeated drug use, somewhere she’d be safe from abuse, where she could work on the many issues she obviously has. Make no mistake, she’s on thin ice and knows it, I’m guessing she won’t get any more breaks if she doesn’t get her act together. After all, there’s only so much the state can do when it comes to offering a helping hand. But I think it was the right thing to do, for her, for her children, and also when you look at the cost of imprisoning someone like her. Would prison make her a better member of society when she gets out? Unlikely. Is she a danger to those around her? Certainly not, if she takes to the treatment.
I also think that her case is emblematic of how the criminal justice system has been going lately, certainly in my county. Just the other day I ran into a reporter who was gathering information for a story about all the programs running in the county that work to “fix” people, rather than imprison them. Drug courts, DWI courts, all those.
Make no mistake, there are times when people have been offered help, assistance, support, and treatment. Times when we offer mercy and what we see as justice, but they see as weakness. Some people won’t help themselves, they just don’t want to put in the time and the effort.
They don’t seem to realize that life is hard for all of us, we all have to work and make sacrifices. They have, and I’ve seen it, a sense of entitlement and for them leniency is just a way of amassing convictions without prison time. I have no problem with the criminal justice system keeping a hammer in its back pocket for those cases. But in general, as happened this week, I am inclined to think that a few helping hands will fix more problems than prison, and cost us less to boot. A long- and short-term savings, coupled with the salvation, if you will, of individuals has got to be a good thing, right? With prisons closing, perhaps we can make the rehab thing work. One just hopes that those in charge of the purse-strings don’t look for a cut in those other programs, too, because I’m certainly not in favor of opening up the prison doors just to save money, with nothing else to keep our streets safe. But here’s a quote from the Austin American Statesman’s story:
“Closing prisons? It's absolutely on the table,” said House Corrections Committee Chairman Jim McReynolds, D-Lufkin, whose panel oversees the state-run system of lockups. “As tight as our budget situation looks, we cannot unravel the fledgling system of diversion and treatment programs that are paying big dividends now for the states. And there’s only one other place to look — prison operations.”
So maybe a budget crunch is just what we needed. I know at 160-odd cases that I’m handling, a wee drop in customers would be more than welcome.
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Drug courts and similar alternatives to traditional courtrooms are skyrocketing around the US. But some argue they are “wrong-headed” policy.
One Friday in 2002, I spent several days in a drug court in San Jose, California. It was not a typical drug court. All 50 defendants had been diagnosed as mentally ill and seriously addicted. The grinding poverty and degradation of their lives was on searing display that day: etched in crumbled, pain-filled, black faces; in the slumped shoulders of battered, middle-aged Mexican-American men with blank eyes who knew they were already dead; and in the rotting teeth and thigh-wide arms of pasty, bloated white women woefully old before their time.
But sprinkled among them were others who had completed court-mandated rehab programs and had come to their graduation ceremony to receive an official hug from the judge and freedom from his judicial oversight, instead of being sent off to yet another stint in prison.
The experience was a revelation. I was completing a book about California’s three- strikes law, and was reeling under the weight of writing about people receiving 25-years-to-life sentences for possessing amounts of cocaine measured in milligrams, or three dollars’ worth of a controlled substance while in jail. And here was a court whose operating philosophy was that drug addicts were not criminals to be punished, but people with a disease that needed treatment; and that it was the job of a judge—working with a team of criminal justice and drug treatment professionals—to fully engage in helping desperate people kick their habits and reclaim their lives.
Given the mandatory-minimum drug sentences then in vogue, the drug court seemed a remarkably innovative and humane step forward, and one I never questioned until I attended a panel discussion entitled “Re-Thinking Courts: Problem-Solving Justice” at the 5th annual Harry Frank Guggenheim Symposium on Crime in America at John Jay College this month.
While the panel didn’t shake my faith in the great work done in drug and other problem-solving courts, the discussion nevertheless raised some critical questions about the stunning growth and sweeping nature of drug courts and similar alternative forms of jurisprudence in America today.
Treatment or Jail: A Fair Choice?
They were raised by panelist Rick Jones, director of the Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem (NY). He called the courts “exercises in wrong-headed policy” and questioned whether drug treatment should even “be housed in the criminal justice system.” He also asked whether people should “be forced to go into treatment or face jail or prison.”
These were provocative questions. After all, according to a 2004-2007 longitudinal study conducted by the National Drug Court Institute, an advocacy and research group which provides technical support to drug and other problem-solving courts, “drug courts significantly improve substance abuse treatment outcomes, substantially reduce crime, and produce greater cost benefits than any other justice strategy.”
Another panelist, Valerie Raine, underscored that study’s conclusions. A former public defender and now the Director of Drug Court Programs at the Center for Court Innovation in New York, Raine said that while voluntary “treatment retention rates are 10-30 percent, comparable [mandated] drug court rates are 60 percent nationally.”
“Drug courts also reduce recidivism rates of all drug court participants – success and failures –by between 10 to 13 percent nationally,” she continued, adding that for “graduates of adult drug courts, the number shoots up to 66 percent.”
Since the inception of drug courts in Miami-Dade County, Florida in 1989, drug courts have grown exponentially. In 1995 there were just 75 in the U.S. By the beginning of 2008, according to the Office of National Drug Control Policy, the number had skyrocketed to 2,140, with an additional 280 in the pipeline.
There are also Community Justice Courts, such as the one run in Red Hook, Brooklyn, by another panelist, Judge Alex Calabrese. They try to solve community problems by providing treatment, job training and a wide range of social services in lieu of incarceration. When combined with drug and other “problem-solving courts” such as DWI, family treatment, juvenile treatment, domestic violence, mental health and reentry courts, there are now well over 3,200 such courts in the U.S.
Another of the panelists, Chandlee Johnson-Kuhn, Chief Judge of Delaware Family Court, is even pioneering a gun court that she says will allow her “to keep more kids in juvenile court” if the shooting did not result in an injury—thus insuring that the juvenile won’t have to simply sit in jail for six months awaiting trial, but instead, can immediately access a wide range of rehabilitative services.
But the arguments on the other side of the drug court debate make compelling reading.
NACDL Study
Jones’ critique was based on a groundbreaking study on drug courts, mental health courts and other forms of problem-solving courts, which scholars group under the category of “therapeutic jurisprudence,” commissioned by the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL). As co-chair of the study, he spent nearly a year holding hearings in seven major cities and taking testimony from over 130 witness. The report, America’s Problem Solving Courts: The Criminal Cost of Treatment and the Case for Reform,” was published in August 2009. “As much as I respect Valerie Raine,” said Jones, “I hope she’s wrong when she says that the ‘verdict is in,’ and that the discussion is closed on whether or not drug courts work. [Because] drug courts are wrong-headed social policy for the country. Addiction is an illness [that shouldn’t] be dropped at the door of the criminal justice system.”
Instead, argued Jones, people should be receiving non-mandated, readily-available treatment in widespread community-based treatment centers.
Jones used the example of a fourth member of the panel, Tina M. Dixons, to illustrate his point. An ex-offender and recovering drug addict, Dixons, now the Regional Coordinator of Dental Services for Phoenix House of New York and Long Island, led a harrowing life of addiction, homelessness, prostitution and multiple arrests beginning at age 13, before finally turning around her life in Judge Calabrese’s court at age 33.
“The moral of Ms. Dixons’ story,” said Jones, “is that I’m glad she’s now [recovered], but that she lost 20 years of treatment opportunities she could have gotten if meaningful community treatment had been available when she was 13. We might have nipped her addiction in the bud, and she won’t have had [to endure] over 20 arrests and become a high-risk addict.”
Then he leveled another criticism: “Often, only first-time offenders or those with no history of violence are admitted into the courts.” Such barriers exist, Jones contended, so that prosecutors and judges can boast of success rates as high as 80 or 90 percent. However, “the vast majority of people who are first time offenders and are caught with small amounts of a controlled substance are never going to become addicts,” said Jones. “We are diverting people [into drug courts and drug treatment] who don’t need diversion, and who wouldn’t otherwise be in the criminal justice system.”
Judge Calabrese responded: “I think a lot of your criticisms are accurate, but the problems are real and they are dropped at the backdoor. [In my court] we’re looking at people who have been addicted for 10 or 20 years to heroin, and we’re demanding that they stop. Well I’ve tried different diets for 10 or 15 years, and I’m only trying to stay away from cheese burgers – not heroin. Sometimes the only way you’re going to [stop people with serve addictions from using drugs] is if the alternative is a jail sentence. I’m a big believer in mandated treatment.” (Which, as Dixons pointed out during her panel presentation, is exactly the threat that Calabrese used to keep her on the road to eventual recovery.)
The discussion concluded with Jones agreeing with Calabrese (sort of). “If a drug court has a 90 percent success rate,” said Jones, “then that court is skimming, and taking only the easy cases. Otherwise their success rates should only be about 30 percent, tops. We need to focus our drug courts on only high-risk people who need the thread of incarceration. That will give us the most bang for our buck.”
Joe Domanick is Associate Director of the Center for Media, Crime and Justice, and West Coast Bureau Chief of The Crime Report
Read full entry »The Los Angeles City Council approved an ordinance Tuesday that will close most of the medical marijuana dispensaries set up in the city in recent years, reports the Christian Science Monitor. More than 600 pot dispensaries have opened in the past 10 months. The new law, which passed 9-3, caps the number of dispensaries at 70 and provides strict rules for where they can operate.
The shops must now be at least 1,000 feet from churches, libraries, schools, playgrounds and other “sensitive” areas. Advocates of medical marijuana criticized the new restrictions for limiting patient access to medicine, but welcomed the ordinance as a sign that medical pot dispensaries were here to stay. A flood of new dispensaries have opened in Los Angeles in the past few years, eliciting complaints by residents in many neighborhoods. California is one of 14 states to have legalized medical pot.
Read full entry »This 2007 report examines the reasons behind the United States' "exploding" incarceration rate, the difficulty of properly treating drug addiction in prison and recommendations for more equitable punishment.
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Read full entry »For the first time since the Texas prison system's substance-abuse treatment programs began nearly 15 years ago, amid controversy over their cost and effectiveness, programs have no waiting list, reports the Austin American-Statesman. In years past, thousands of drug- and alcohol-addicted convicts had to wait for months — in some cases years — for space to open up in the treatment programs, filling prisons with felons who could have been paroled, and confounding a smooth transition of convicts from prisons to programs to parole.
But officials said that because the Legislature voted two years to ago greatly expand the treatment programs, the chronic backlog that had plagued them since their inception, at the behest of then-Gov. Ann Richards, is now gone. At the same time, the prison population has decreased slightly in recent months, part of a national trend.
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