DRUG (WARRIOR) REFORM

A cop-turned-legislator joins Olympia's growing movement for drug
treatment and sentencing sanity.

IF the struggle for a saner drug policy needs a poster child, Chris
Hurst seems tailor-made for the role. Hurst knows the fruitless,
destructive collective mania that Richard Nixon dubbed "the War on
Drugs" from the ground up. He's a former King County narcotics
detective and currently a detective on the Black Diamond police force,
and so spends a lot of time apprehending people who use drugs, sell
drugs, and steal and rob to buy drugs. "I've put bad guys in prison
for 19 years," he says. "No one in the world is going to call me soft
on crime. I've worked at this so long, I've put the same people in
prison three times."

And that's how Hurst came to realize he was helping throw money and
lives away: "We're going broke, and we're not dealing with the real
problems. It costs a fortune to house someone in prison, and we're
increasing our prison population at an exponential rate. There's got
to be better way."

Such notions are hardly novel--pointy-headed liberals and raging
libertarians have been voicing them for decades. As Hurst's boss,
Black Diamond Police Cmdr. Glenn Dickson, says, "If it were someone
else saying those things, maybe it wouldn't carry so much weight. But
he speaks with such a depth of experience you have to listen. He's an
awesome, awesome cop."

As of two weeks ago, Hurst is also a state legislator, with a shot at
putting his ideas into action. As a liberal Democrat running against a
well-liked incumbent in a conservative exurban rural district, Hurst
ran on a platform of getting smart, rather than just "tough," on
crime, and expanding drug treatment and other alternatives to prison.
His opponent tried to avoid the subject; as Hurst says, "It's very
difficult to criticize a police officer on any law and justice issue."

Hurst won narrowly, and arrived in Olympia at an opportune moment.
After nearly two decades of determinate sentencing/mandatory
minimum/three strikes/lock 'em up/drug war fervor, a new sort of alarm
is being raised, in Olympia as elsewhere: sheer fiscal terror (and,
for those who bother to think about it, moral outrage) at what locking
'em up is bringing us to. Nearly 2 million Americans are behind
bars--far and away the largest number and the highest percentage among
industrial nations. Washington's state prison population (more than
14,000, including nearly 3,000 drug offenders) is expected to grow by
about 500 per year until 2005 and hit 20,702 by 2013. And officials
are considering renting cells from other states.

These figures don't include about 10,000 prisoners awaiting trial or
serving sentences of less than a year, including most of those
convicted of drug possession; they're consigned to county jails, whose
total population grew by a whopping 16 percent from 1996 to '97, the
last reported years. "The reality is that counties spend 70 percent or
more of their budgets on law enforcement," says Ken Stark, director of
the state's Alcohol and Substance Abuse Division. "Most property
crimes are done to get drugs. At least 70 percent of our inmates had
drug or alcohol problems. To the extent you can get them to stop using
drugs and alcohol, they stop committing crimes."

Since 1994, the King County courts have pioneered a much-praised way
of doing just that. Defendants charged with drug possession are
offered an alternative to the trial-and-jail-or-prison route. They may
waive their defense and all future appeals, and undergo a rigorous
yearlong regimen of drug treatment, testing, counseling, and such
self-betterment as the court may direct in its regular reviews. If
they flunk or quit, they get the full sentence. If they "graduate," as
it's called, they get a big courtroom party with a cake and no record
of the crime.

Spend an hour in drug court and you'll see the full parade of human
misery, hope, and frailty pass before the bench. Judge Nicole McInnes
plays by turns the coach, drill sergeant, and wise auntie as she
orders a ragged, rattled codger to show up on time!, hears a woman
vehemently contest her "bad UAs" (urinalysis readings) and sends her
downstairs for a new test, advises a serious young fellow whose
counselor doesn't respect his religion, and unsuccessfully urges a
sad, streetworn older woman to try drug court instead of shuffling off
to jail. You get the feeling a lot of people have waited a long time
for a little authority and guidance.

FIVE YEARS AGO, drug court was a suspect, vanguard idea. Now eight
other counties have followed King's lead. Cops (not just the Chris
Hursts but the Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs),
prosecutors, and public defenders all praise it--with a new boost from
research. This month the Washington State Institute for Public Policy,
after reviewing 11 drug-court programs around the nation, reported
that they reduced the likelihood of recidivism by a whopping 16
percent. King County drug court manager Mary Taylor reports that after
one year only 9 percent of its grads had been arrested on new felonies
vs. 22 percent of drop-outs and 33 percent of offenders who didn't
participate. This is heckuva deal not only for those who avoid jail
and turn their lives around, but for every taxpayer and potential
crime victim. After crunching the numbers, the WSIPP finds that each
drug-court diversion saves $2,923 in court and jail costs, plus up to
$3,450 in crime losses.

So if drug court is such a bargain, why is it so hard to fund? So far,
federal start-up grants have largely funded all of Washington's drug
courts. But they run out after three or four years; King County is
already scrambling to keep its drug court going. Ken Stark's office
recommended that the state spend $6 million to shore up current drug
courts and start "four or five" new ones, then downsized its request
to $3 million to maintain what's here. But Gov. Gary Locke and the
Department of Social and Health Services budgeted not a penny for drug
courts.

Nothing personal, says Locke aide Dick Van Wagenen: "That's among many good
programs that weren't included. The governor's budget is very tight and
focused on a few big priorities, mainly education." Blame the voters, who
passed Initiative 601, limiting state expenditures; and Referendum 49,
dedicating auto-excise taxes to highways. Nevertheless, Locke's budget
includes $4 million for what Van Wagenen calls a "comprehensive" anti-drug
"education, treatment, and enforcement" effort to "demonstrate what you can
achieve with a major infusion of resources" in Pierce County, which already
may have the state's best-funded and best-organized anti-drug program.

The state (and counties) may also be playing bureaucratic chicken: Wait and
see if the other guy will pay. That's only fair, argues Van Wagenen: "It
appears that the primary savings from the drug courts is for the counties,"
since "very few of the people who would have gone to prison are eligible."
Not so, says Taylor: Of one year's "graduates," 14 percent "were looking at
prison."

County officials tend to see drug treatment as the state's business.
"My commissioners have told me if the county has to pay for it, we
will no longer have a drug court," says Spokane County Judge James
Murphy. That old soft-on-crime bugaboo may also play in: Van Wagenen
says he's heard from some counties where "commissioners don't want
anything to do with drug treatment."

But a broad coalition of House Republicans and Democrats, led by Rep.
Ida Ballasiotes (the previous champion of tough work-release and
sex-offender laws) and including Chris Hurst, has entered a bill that
would expand drug courts and opportunities for drug treatment. House
Bill 1006, due for a hearing this week, would spend $4 million on drug
courts. It would give judges authority to sentence offenders to
specific treatment and rehab regimes as an alternative to jail. And it
would let them consider as "mitigating factors" whether a quantity of
drugs sold was tiny and the seller was a low-level flunky.

This is meant to correct a cruel and costly inequity. As Hurst says,
"An addict who goes to the Bon Marche and steals $1,000 worth of suits
probably won't get any jail time. If that same addict sells a 10th of
a gram of cocaine to get a 10th of a gram, the standard sentencing
range is 21 to 27 months in prison." A judge could sentence that poor
schmuck to treatment rather than $50,000 worth of state hospitality.
Controversial as this measure is, Spokane County Judge Tari Eitzen
says it may be dispensable: "We already have the statutory discretion
under case law"--though many judges don't use it.

So far, drug court is only available to druggies who happen to get
caught holding. But why wouldn't it work as well when the same people
get caught selling or stealing? Hurst looks forward to more eruptions
of sanity: "This is the first stage in a long transition in the way we
deal with crime and drug abuse."