DRUG COURT PEP TALK: INCARCERATION WITHOUT TREATMENT A WASTE

Benefits of diversion programs touted at Rimrock confab

The drug court coordinator for the state of Montana made a strong
case for the effectiveness of jail diversion programs Wednesday
during the annual meeting of the Rimrock Foundation.

Jeffrey Kushner, who was hired for the new position in January, told
a lunchtime audience at the Mansfield Health Education Center that
when the criminal justice system teams up with treatment providers
like Rimrock Foundation, governments save money, prison populations
decline, and more offenders kick their drug addictions.

States that continue to lock up criminals without treating their
alcohol and drug problems are just "throwing money down a rat hole,"
he said.

The gathering Wednesday was the 40th annual meeting of the Rimrock
Foundation, and David Cunningham, the foundation's chief executive
officer, used the occasion to praise Mona Sumner, who helped found
Rimrock in June of 1968. He said Sumner, now the foundation's chief
operating officer, has played an important part in helping change the
lives of 80,000 clients over the years.

"What a wonderful gift you've given all of us," he
said.

Among her accomplishments was helping to start the Adult Misdemeanor
Drug Court in Billings Municipal Court and a program that provides
addiction treatment to jail inmates at the foundation's Silver Leaf
Center.

Kushner said those kinds of programs must become more widespread if
the United States wants to reduce its ballooning inmate population.

The problem in a nutshell, Kushner said, is that the United States
has 5 percent of the world's population but 25 percent of the world's
incarcerated population. And one-quarter of the people behind bars in
America are there for drug-related crimes, he said.

One of the best solutions to that problem appears to be drug courts,
said Kushner, who headed drug treatment agencies for Oregon, Colorado
and Nebraska, then became the drug court administrator for the 22nd
Judicial Circuit in St. Louis, Mo., the job he held before coming to
Montana.

Of the 20 states that admit the most people to drug treatment
programs, 19 had incarceration rates below the national average, he
said. In addition, while admissions to drug treatment programs
nationwide rose 37.4 percent between 1995 and 2005, violent crime
rates fell 31.5 percent during the same period.

Kushner said the results are not nearly as good if the criminal
justice system fails to work closely with treatment providers. A case
in point is California, he said, where passage of Proposition 36
eight years ago changed sentencing laws to require nonviolent
offenders convicted of drug possession to be sentenced to treatment
and prohibited sending them to jail or prison.

Because judges couldn't hold any sanctions over the offenders' heads,
Kushner said, criminals had no incentive to seek treatment or stay
out of trouble. The result was that 25 percent of them never even
showed up for treatment, and of those who did complete treatment, 86
percent were arrested on new drug charges within 30 months.

By contrast, offenders who pass through the municipal drug court in
Billings have to meet specific benchmarks or they can be subject to a
range of sanctions, including incarceration, he said. Of the 163
people served by the court since 2005, he said, 95 percent were
employed 12 months after completing the program, 94 percent passed
random drug screens, and no graduates of the program interviewed 12
months later had been re-arrested.

Kushner said similar results have been seen at the Silver Leaf
Center, where jail inmates admitted to drug court go for daytime
treatment programs. It has served 69 people since 2006, and more than
98.5 percent of the participants remain drug-free, he said, and
everyone who completed the program was employed six months later.

Those statistics were familiar to many people in the audience, but
what many did not know, judging from the reaction to Kushner's
telling, was that former U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno started the
first drug court in the county in Miami-Dade County, Fla., in 1989.

Now, Kushner said, there are 2,000 drugs courts in the country - 12
in Montana - serving 120,000 clients at any given time. Kushner said
after the meeting that his job as state drug court coordinator is to
monitor the drug courts, help find grant funding, work with the
Legislature on drug court issues and maintain a statewide data
system, which he recently established.