DRUG COURT PROVIDES ADDICTS A 2ND CHANCE

Damon Fuseyamore vividly recalls smoking "my last nickel of crack" on
June 16, 1997, while sitting on the steps outside his New York City
residence.

He said he owed loan sharks money and had been arrested two weeks
before "with six nickels of crack and a bunch of money."

He was charged with selling crack and was looking at two to seven
years in prison. But he had another option.

"I had a choice of doing jail time or changing my life and going
through treatment," he said. "If you have a choice between doing two
to seven or going through the program and going into treatment, any
smart person would take the program."

Fuseyamore, 45, and the father of a 10-year-old son, celebrated 10
years of sobriety in June and has been a mechanic for the New York
City Fire Department for six years.

Fuseyamore's story is one of thousands touted by supporters of
alternative drug courts.

The courts, which are multiplying across the United States, began 18
years ago as an experiment to attack a growing crack cocaine epidemic
in Miami. They rely on treatment, rigorous supervision and
accountability as a way to help, for the most part, nonviolent drug
users rather than sending them to prison.

Growth And Savings

There are 2,016 drug courts in about 1,100 counties, according to the
National Drug Court Institute. That number, the institute says, is up
from 1,048 five years ago and is almost 1,800 more than existed 10
years ago.

According to West Huddleston, CEO of the institute, a 2005 study --
the most recent available -- showed 70 percent of drug court
participants graduate the program. Graduates reoffend at a rate of 17
percent on average, compared with the 66 percent recidivism rate of
drug offenders who do time in prison.

That study also showed the average cost of a drug court participant
is $3,500, compared with annual prison costs that range from $13,000
to $44,000 per inmate, Huddleston said. A new study is due to be
released next year.

Stearns County's adult drug court began in 2002 and had admitted 136
participants as of September. It had graduated 57 participants, and
those graduates' reoffense rate was 11 percent, according to a
recidivism study conducted by the Stearns County Attorney's Office.
The county in 2006 established a family drug court, one of two in the
state at the time.

Alternative drug courts are funded by a combination of federal, state
and charitable dollars. There is $15.2 million for the Department of
Justice Drug Court Discretionary Grant Program in the 2008 budget
that awaits President Bush's signature. In addition, the federal
Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration has $10.2
million in the 2008 budget to add treatment beds within operational
drug courts.

Supporters say more is needed.

"We're scratching the surface. I think it's critical that a drug
court is in every county in America," said Huddleston, who estimates
that 120,000 people are served annually by the model, but more than 4
million more could benefit from it. "Drug courts are the most
underutilized solution to America's drug problem."

"I see it as a systemic change in the way that courts do business,"
said Ann Wilson, who coordinates Missouri's drug courts.

Missouri, which had eight drug courts in 1998, has added 100 courts
since then, Wilson said. Missouri has more drug courts per capita
than any state and as of Sept. 1 boasted 108 operational drug court
programs, she said.

Minnesota had two drug courts at the beginning of 2002. Within five
years, the state had added 17 drug courts.

The Critics

The program is mocked by some as adult day care or hand-holding for
addicts, Huddleston admitted. Eric J. Miller, an assistant professor
of law at St. Louis University is among the unconvinced.

Miller said the drug court program takes away the adversarial design
and uses the judge to engage the defendant in a 12-step style program.

"That's not what judges do," he said.

Miller questions whether there is enough thought to weeding out the
people drug court doesn't suit.

"A lot of thought has to be given to the types of people it best
works for," he said. "I'm not saying it doesn't work at all. But I
think there needs to be more thought about who it works for."

As that learning process evolves, courts are having discussions about
how drug courts will function ideally if they go to scale and how to
reallocate existing resources to keep drug court programs alive.

Ongoing research is invaluable to determining the future of drug
courts, said Judge Robert Rancourt, who runs a juvenile drug court
program in Chisago County.

"What it comes down to is it's a system where we're trying to
determine the cost benefit of these courts before we try to rapidly
expand them," Rancourt said. "Set up standard guidelines so expansion
comes with the proper systems."

Research shows that people who are highly addicted and most at risk
to reoffend are the best fits for drug court, said Dan Griffin, court
operations analyst for the Minnesota Judicial Branch. A potential
danger is mixing people in the same drug court program who have
varying severity levels of drug problems and risks of reoffending,
Griffin said.

The Future

In the perfect world, every judge would be able to recognize an
offender's substance abuse problem and refer them to the appropriate
program at an initial court hearing, Huddleston said. Highly trained
lawyers, judges and treatment professionals would cooperate on a
daily drug court calendar that would alleviate crushing caseloads in
other courtrooms, he said.

One fear Huddleston has is that the institutionalization of drug
courts could water down the concept and return the judicial system to
one of "punishment and retribution" rather than one of humanity,
rehabilitation and focusing on the underlying problems driving so
much of criminal behavior.

"Drug courts have done an amazing job of undoing the thinking within
the justice system that addicts are bad people who can be punished
out of their drug dependence," he said. "Instead, drug courts have
brought a way of thinking into the justice system that says and shows
with data that addicts are redeemable but they need some very
specific strategies employed on them. They need long-term treatment,
they need immediacy of response, whether sanctions or incentive, and
they need ongoing judicial accountability."

Stearns County Attorney Janelle Kendall admits she, too, was
skeptical about drug courts.

"Our drug court was certainly not the prosecutors' idea," she said.
"Applause and counselors and asking how offenders felt about their
treatment prospects was not our usual way of getting offenders' attention."

The drug court concept seems to reach "what's left of the humanity of
the drug addict," she said.

"They don't want to be like this, they know they do bad things when
they use drugs, and at some point, the drug court model seems to
reach them in a way that the retributive part of behavior
modification does not. I would have never believed that we'd find
that, so far, getting into these offenders' heads and literally
forcing them to live in the real world drug free for the period they
are in drug court works twice as well as anything else we've tried so
far."