LONG WAITS FOR DRUG TREATMENT LEAVE OFFENDERS BATTLING WITHOUT
TOOLS

Overhaul of Travis County Probation Department Is Challenged By
Insufficient State Funding, Officials Say.

Julie Vasquez-Martinez has been a probation officer in Travis County
for 10 years and has witnessed the struggles of felony drug and
alcohol offenders trying to turn their lives around.

And Martinez has learned that a critical time for many people
convicted of common drug crimes comes immediately after they are
sentenced to probation.

"It's imperative to get them into treatment early," she said. "It's
imperative so they don't continue to make the wrong decisions. They
need these tools and techniques to stay clean and sober."

But department statistics show that hundreds of newly sentenced
probationers in Travis County are waiting to get into court-ordered
substance abuse treatment.

Judges send some offenders to county jails to wait for a treatment
slot to open up, exacerbating the county's ongoing jail crowding
problem. Others are released into the community to fight their
addiction on their own.

The wait for treatment is usually several months, department officials said.

The waiting lists in Travis County are among the longest in the
state and could hinder the probation department's ambitious overhaul
of its practices.

The goal of the two-year effort is to eliminate guesswork and let
research and analysis determine the best ways of keeping
probationers from re-offending and ending up behind bars.

Geraldine Nagy, director of Travis County adult probation -
officially called the Community Supervision and Corrections
Department - said recent numbers show that 499 people were waiting
for outpatient drug and alcohol services, up from 373 2 1/2 years
ago. Most of them are not in jail.

That's the longest waiting list for outpatient treatment of any
Texas county, according to state statistics. (Statistics for Harris
County, Texas' largest, were unavailable.)

Meanwhile, Nagy said, Travis County has 118 probationers waiting to
get into residential substance abuse facilities, including the
county-run, 76-bed SMART program near the jail in Del Valle.

About half of them are waiting in the Travis County Jail, which on
Friday was more than 400 inmates over its designed capacity. Crowded
jails led Travis County voters last year to approve spending $23.5
million for jail expansion; construction should begin next year.

The Texas Department of Criminal Justice funds the county probation
department, and this year, the county received $2.1 million for
substance abuse treatment for probationers, up from $1.9 million last year.

But without a significant boost in state money, the waiting lists
are likely to increase in Travis County as the probation department
puts more emphasis on treatment, Nagy said.

With Texas prisons full and some key state lawmakers hesitant to
spend millions of dollars to build new ones, the Legislature is
expected to look at bolstering probation programs when it reconvenes
next month.

Nagy hopes lawmakers will increase funding for drug and alcohol
treatment programs.

In the meantime, probationers such as a 19-year-old man whom
Martinez currently supervises will have a harder time turning their
lives around.

The man, whom Martinez would not identify, citing privacy laws, was
sentenced in June to probation for a felony cocaine possession conviction.

He has been waiting since then to get into intensive outpatient drug
treatment and was arrested again recently on a subsequent drug charge.

Those charges were dismissed, and Martinez hopes the man can stay
away from the bad influences in his life long enough to learn the
tools to stop using.

"It's a battle against time," she said.

State District Judge Jon Wisser, who has presided over a felony
court in Travis County since the 1980s, said that waits to get into
substance abuse treatment are not new. He said treatment funding has
long been an easy target for politicians looking to trim budgets.

Some defense lawyers say the long waits are an injustice and a waste
of taxpayer money. And they question the practice of sending
probationers to jail to wait for treatment.

"In that situation, a sentence that is supposed to be therapeutic
ends up being punitive," Austin defense lawyer Jon Evans said.

Shane Brooks, another defense lawyer, said that clients who are
pondering a plea bargain often will choose incarceration over
probation, calculating that the time they spend waiting for
treatment in jail, combined with the length of treatment, is longer
than what they would serve by going straight to jail.

"It's disheartening," Martinez said. "You know these clients. You
care about them. You want them to do better . . .

"Especially when they are young like this and they don't have the
best role models."