A DRUG COURT TAKES A RISK TO AID ADDICTS

NEW YORK Ten years ago, Eddie Santiago was doing pretty well for
himself. As a plumber, he had so many jobs that he often worked six days a
week. He owned a home in Queens and another one in Florida. He had a wife
and two young children.

By the time Santiago was busted last year for selling drugs to an
undercover officer in Red Hook, Brooklyn, not much was left.

The wife and two children by now teenagers were gone. So was the
Queens home and the one in Florida. He had lost his job. And he had lost a
third child, a baby boy who was born to a girlfriend and is now in foster
care.

He also might well have found himself behind bars had it not been for a new
experimental program intended to keep nonviolent drug offenders out of
prison.

The other day, Santiago and 11 others became the first group of former
addicts to graduate from the program, known as the Brooklyn Treatment Court.

At the graduation ceremony, which was attended by the state's chief judge,
Judith Kaye, as well as many proud drug counselors and family members,
Santiago talked about all that he had and lost, and his hopes for the
future. And he explained how, much as he hated to admit it, he had been
helped by the threat of doing time.

"'Do you want to go to jail or go to a drug program?"' he remembers being
asked by the judge when he was arraigned. "I don't want either of them," he
had shot back. Then his girlfriend slugged him in the shoulder.

While it is too early to tell whether Santiago and his fellow graduates
will indeed be able to stay out of jail, the graduation ceremony was deeply
moving, both for the hope it expressed in human resilience and in the
redemptive possibilities of the justice system.

Since the 1970s, New York has had some of the toughest and most inflexible
policies toward drug offenders in the United States.

First are the socalled Rockefeller drug laws with their tough some
would say Draconian minimum sentences. Then there is the state's
secondfelony offender law, which mandates a prison sentence for two felony
convictions within 10 years.

Together, these tough laws have forced a huge expansion of New York's
prison system. Last year, no fewer than a third of the state's 70,000
prisoners were incarcerated for nonviolent drug crimes.

Among lawenforcement officials, criminaljustice experts and even state
lawmakers, there is by now a sense that this growth is illadvised. New
York spends about $600 million a year to imprison nonviolent drug offenders
without, it seems, making much of a dent in drug abuse.

But even to begin discussing ways of amending the laws is considered risky.
In an era when getting tough on crime is almost universally admired, few
politicians want to invite an attack ad accusing them of coddling criminals.

Gov. George Pataki, for example, was concerned enough about the waste of
human and state resources to propose amending the secondfelony offender
law in 1995, but in the end backed away, leaving the law essentially
unchanged.

At the graduation ceremony, Charles Hynes, the Brooklyn district attorney
and no one's notion of a softie, called the new treatment court a "symbol
of an enlightened answer to the drug plague." And he railed against plans
to build more and more prisons to house more and more drug offenders.

"Can anyone," he said, "understand the lunacy of the prisononly approach?"

To graduate from the treatment court, which is in the Brooklyn State
Supreme Court building, Santiago and the 11 others had to complete
individualized treatment programs laid out for them by a judge. All were
required to make frequent court appearances for which their urine was
tested, and all were stiffly sanctioned for backsliding.

According to the drug court's administrators, roughly a third of the
offenders who have entered the program so far have already violated its
terms and wound up back in jail.

These days, Santiago is living with his parents and has returned to work.
He hopes that when his girlfriend, who was arrested with him, graduates
from her treatment program upstate they will be able to get their son, now
2 years old, out of foster care.

As he stood by the cake at the graduation ceremony, neatly dressed and
wearing a religious medal and a miniature plumber's wrench around his neck,
Santiago was tough to picture sleeping out on the street with hookers.

He is, he said, guardedly optimistic about reclaiming his life. "The way I
am today," he said ruefully, "I would have stayed clean."