COURTS AND DRUGS

Treatment Programs Need Close Scrutiny

The huge impact on the criminal justice system by voter-approved
Proposition 36 is beginning to be felt in Solano County.

Nonviolent drug users no longer will flow into crowded county jails.
Instead, voters ruled, they must be placed in drug-treatment programs
and supervised by probation officers.

If Solano County is able to handle the enormous caseload that will be
created, it can manage what the county's chief probation officer called
a "major, major radical change to the courts."

That is one big "if."

County supervisors last week approved a $1.2 million program aimed to
fulfill the mandates of Proposition 36. It will manage all nonviolent
drug possession convictions, misdemeanor and felony. There will be
hundreds of men and women sent into treatment programs by judges
stripped of their discretion to send any of them to jail.

Officials are planning for 400 of the 2,000 annual cases that come
through the county court system to be eligible for Proposition 36
diversion in the program's first year. In the following years, that
number is expected to jump to as high as 800. Roughly half of the local
program's budget, some $652,900, will be spent on outpatient treatment
programs in its first year.

A monumental task will be finding treatment programs for these convicted
drug abusers.

Most offenders will be sent to privately operated programs under
contract with the county. Some of these folks could turn their lives
around. Others could merely waste time in rehab, time that they
otherwise would waste in jail.

Oversight and constant evaluation of these programs' effectiveness is
one component that must be emphasized.