Series: Four Lives, One Last Chance - A Year In Drug Court: Part 20 Of 41

ACT III. A TIME OF QUESTIONING

By the mid-1990s, Patty Gilbertson had been long confounded by the
onslaught of crack addicts pouring off the streets of the Peninsula.

She was then serving as the director of substance-abuse services for the
Hampton-Newport News Community Services Board, the public agency charged
with treating addicts in the two cities.

This new breed of crack addict seemed resistant to the agency's methods.
They spent a few weeks or months in jail and treatment programs, only to be
lured right back to the streets by the promise of that powerful cocaine high.

The counselors had become so frustrated with these obstinate addicts that
they began to question themselves.

"Is it us?" Gilbertson wondered. "Is it them?"

Then, at a conference in Florida, she found a potential solution when she
visited a Drug Court program in Orlando.

"Wow!" she thought. "This could work."

She returned from her trip with the idea of starting a Drug Court in either
Newport News or Hampton. Unfortunately, the federal government soon stopped
offering grant money for the programs, and her grant application went into
a file cabinet.

The drug problem had made an obvious impact on the courts. Newport News
Circuit Court Judge Verbena Askew looked at her clogged docket - about 80
percent of the cases involving drugs in some way - and wondered what had
happened.

As a judge and former city attorney, she knew local politicians had been
grumbling and wringing their hands about drugs "infesting" the Peninsula.

The city's four judges had been hearing about 8,000 cases a year, the
fourth-highest in the state. Apparently, the police and the courts were
doing their jobs. The problem had to lie somewhere else, the judge thought.

"The traditional ways are not working," Askew said.

She began to see the users themselves as the true victims of the addiction.
The judge was ready to find a better solution than warehousing these people
in prisons.

"When you incarcerate a drug addict, they come out a drug addict," she
said. "You haven't addressed the problem. The problem is: What made them
resort to drugs in the first place?"

Askew took a look at the city's first-offender program, which placed people
arrested for their first drug offense on supervised probation. Eighty
percent of the participants were arrested again, the judge said.

She knew the Roanoke Drug Court, which had started two years earlier in
1995, was posting some early successes. So the judge asked the Newport News
Probation and Parole Office to seek a grant to start a Drug Court in
Newport News.

"This is the answer," she thought.

Her timing was good. By then, 1997, the government began offering grants
again. When the Probation and Parole folks went to Gilbertson, she took the
grant application she'd prepared out of the cabinet and went back to work.

As Gilbertson and Askew began to work together, they felt they had a
compelling case. Drug Court seemed to make sense for the addicts, the
overburdened courts and taxpayers. When they put their final numbers
together, Askew says, they determined that it would cost the state $3,000 a
year to keep someone in Drug Court, while locking them up can cost anywhere
from $20,000 to $39,000 a year.

Still, Askew heard the criticisms. Because addicts had to plead guilty
before entering the program, defense lawyers would oppose it. A judge from
another jurisdiction told her, "This is a waste of time."

But Askew pushed on in her belief that the traditional role of a judge had
become "obsolete" when faced with the modern drug problem.

Askew became a founding member and keystone of a planning committee that
brought together the divergent interests of treatment and law enforcement
on Drug Court. The committee traveled around the country to observe other
drug courts, while devising their own blueprint for operating a program in
Newport News.

Askew would later become the first judge to hear Drug Court cases in
Newport News.

Newport News Police Chief Dennis Mook and Commonwealth's Attorney Howard
Gwynn also sat on the planning committee. Gwynn's office was the agency
that applied for one of the federal grants.

Most of the addicts who would eventually land in the Newport News Drug
Court had been nothing more than names written in a notebook kept behind a
heavy steel door at the jail. The entries told nothing about them - they
simply listed their age, address and charge.

There was nothing to indicate that Vernon once dreamed of working in the
huge glass office towers in his hometown. Or that Linda once thought of
joining the Army like her daddy or driving a truck like her grandpa.

There was nothing to indicate that Jennifer had two children who missed
their mother, or that Linwood had a mother who agonized over her addicted
son. These scribbled names were not mothers or fathers, sons or daughters.
They were drug addicts who had become criminals because they couldn't stop
using drugs.

Nearly all of them had committed crimes. Most had even sold drugs. But they
weren't profiting from this lifestyle. Instead, they were feeding their
habits while living in horrific conditions.

And many had come to believe what society had told them for too long - that
they were bad, immoral people because they had drug addictions.

Drug Court overturned those notions and worked under a different premise:
Addicts are people who have a sickness that leads them to crime.

Maybe without the sickness - without the drug addiction - they could again
be mothers or fathers, sons or daughters.

That's why city leaders fell in behind the promise of Drug Court.

"If they weren't drug addicts, they wouldn't be criminals and they wouldn't
be taxing the system," said Police Chief Mook.

"It's more meaningful to cure a human being and make them a valuable member
of society than be held back by the old paradigms of justice."

After a year of planning, the city won a $400,000 grant. Along with
$250,000 in state money, Newport News had enough cash to run the Drug Court
program for two years.

"It was like a collective 'Whew' went throughout Newport News," Gilbertson
said.

"I think everyone was determined to see this happen."