MORE RURAL COUNTIES TRYING DRUG COURTS

Alternative System Requires Resources

ALBANY Circuit Judge Eddie Lovelace knows the look: gaunt bodies, eyes like
slits.

It's the look of people he has sent to prison in the grip of drugs, people
he knew well in this town of 2,000.

Consider the woman from his church. The daughter of a tobacco farmer
attended Bible class regularly as a child, grew up, got married and had
children. Then she was caught stealing to support a drug habit.

Lovelace gave her probation after she pleaded guilty to embezzling from her
employer. Later, a urine test showed she was still doing drugs. Lovelace
sent her to prison.

"It was just a sad situation," he said. "I was really moved and hated to do
it. But I had a job to do."

Feeling helpless against the power of drug addiction, Lovelace and other
judges in rural Kentucky are volunteering their time to join a federal
experiment that's being tried in Lexington and other Kentucky cities, but
whose prospects in rural areas are unclear.

Known as drug courts, the program preaches rehabilitation instead of
incarceration. It allows offenders to avoid prison if they attend AA-like
counseling sessions and submit to random drug screens. But prison awaits
those who fail.

Until this month, there was only one rural drug court in Kentucky in the
1st Judicial circuit consisting of Fulton, Hickman, Carlisle and Ballard
counties. But the idea is catching on: a drug court for juveniles opened in
Whitley County on May 19, and judges in 15 other judicial circuits around
Kentucky, 11 of them rural, are planning or seriously considering drug courts.

The programs have garnered important support and funding from state and
federal sources. Joseph Lambert, the chief justice of the Kentucky Supreme
Court, wants to take the program statewide.

"The only limitation right now is the availability of judges who are
willing to volunteer," he said.

But it could be hard to convince many of them, given their heavy caseloads
and the lack of statistical proof that drug courts work. Although the
program is operational in about 600 court systems nationwide, there has
been little research to show they work better than standard probation.

Perhaps the most thorough study, by the Santa Monica, Calif.-based RAND
research institute, found that drug court participants in Maricopa County,
Ariz., were 10 percent less likely to get re-arrested for a crime than
their counterparts in standard probation.

Growth in drug crimes

Mary Noble, the chief judge of the Fayette circuit, started the second
Kentucky drug court in August 1996. (The first one was started in Jefferson
County in 1993.) Of the 379 offenders admitted by her and other
participating judges, a little over half were later dropped because they
used drugs, failed to show up for counseling or committed some other
violation. From July 1997 through last December, 92 participants were
re-arrested for a crime while enrolled.

Ray Larson, the commonwealth's attorney in Lexington, said drug courts may
work for those who want off drugs, but some just want a free pass out of
prison.

"I know there are some people in the program who are just using it to avoid
responsibility for what they've done," he said.

Still, the sheer volume of drug arrests has judges looking for alternatives
to prison. In Kentucky, the total number of inmates tripled from 1985
through 1998. During the same period, the number of those incarcerated for
drug offenses went up by nearly 14 times.

And anecdotal success stories have earned drug courts some important
supporters. Lambert said he became an advocate when he watched a drug court
graduation in Fulton County. He heard from one graduate who was destined
for prison until drug court kept him clean for a year and he was able to
mend relations with his wife and children.

"I thought to myself, `Any program that can do that is worth considering,'
" Lambert said.

U.S. Rep. Hal Rogers, a former Somerset prosecutor, also is an important
supporter. As chairman of the House appropriations subcommittee over
justice programs, the veteran Republican has approved President Clinton's
requests to increase the national drug court budget. It grew from $12
million in 1995 to $40 million this year, said Rogers' spokesman, Dan DuBray.

Some of that money has found its way to Kentucky, which received $813,000
in grants from the federal drug courts program last year, double the amount
from the year before.

Sparse resources

The experience in the 1st judicial circuit in far Western Kentucky shows
the hurdles drug courts face in rural areas, where there is little public
transportation, and fewer counseling facilities and jobs than in cities
important considerations for a program where intense supervision and
vocational rehabilitation are key.

Program coordinator Phyllis Teeters said there are few drug treatment
facilities in the 900-square-mile area, and travel distance can be a
problem. Some participants in the program which had its first graduation on
May 4 have to drive up to 60 miles to attend sessions, she said.

"Resources are very skimpy in these small towns and small counties," she
said. "It's a large area to cover. That makes it difficult."

Lovelace, the sole circuit judge for Clinton, Wayne and Russell counties,
already runs the eighth-busiest circuit in Kentucky based on the number of
new cases per judge. His docket is so full that he holds court on Saturdays.

To run the drug court, he says he'll need to hire a program coordinator to
help monitor the participants, and he'll need to pay for addiction
counseling, urinalysis, rent and other items. He has applied for a $665,000
federal grant that would stretch over three years. That would cover the
cost of enrolling 200 offenders for one year each.

Other counties are applying for grants from the same pot of money. In
Whitley County, which lacks a juvenile jail, Judge-Executive Mike Patrick
saw the program as a way to reduce the annual $50,000 to $70,000 the county
pays to send its young offenders to out-of-county holding cells.

His county got $95,000 in federal and state funding last October to try a
juvenile drug court for 18 months. Leslie Ellison, a substance abuse
counselor from nearby London, was hired to run it. He hopes each year to
take 30 teen-agers, who will live at home and attend mandatory treatment
and counseling.

In Laurel County, Circuit Judge Roderick Messer got a federal grant of only
about $5,000 to plan a drug court not enough to hire staff to monitor
participants.

"We're trying to do this on a shoestring," he said. "What I'm trying to do
is the same thing they're doing in Fayette with a lot less money."

(For the 1999 fiscal year, the Fayette County program received more than
$350,000 in federal and state funding.)

The Laurel program got off to a rocky start. Judy Coffey, its first
participant, left a residential treatment facility after only one day. A
warrant was issued for her arrest, but when police arrived at her address
in rural Laurel County, they discovered that her mobile home had
disappeared as well.

"Everything they had's gone," said John Whitehead, the London police
officer whose arrest of Coffey and her husband during a DUI stop last year
led to her enrollment in the rehabilitation program. She was re-arrested
early this month.

Despite that experience, Messer is willing to try again. He is considering
another candidate for drug court.

"We feel like we're making progress, but we've certainly got a ways to go,"
he said.

Despite the problems, Tom Handy, the prosecutor in Laurel County, believes
drug courts could provide a needed alternative. His London office is two
blocks away from the headquarters of a 3-year-old federal anti-drug effort
known as the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area program.

"The thing that we need to do is get people off drug abuse rather than just
warehousing them and not solving the problem," he said. "The problem is
just going to get larger with time, and we have to look at new ways to
address that."

Reach Ty Tagami at (606) 678-4655 or ttagami@herald-leader.com.