WINNERS NOW, AND WINNERS TOMORROW

Ifyou read staff writer Jim Houston's moving account of Columbus Drug
Court's "graduation" ceremonies a few days ago, you already have a sense of
what this program is all about.

It's about punishment, and it's about hard work -- but those are means, not
an end. What it's ultimately about is saving young people and, in the
process, making life better for the rest of us as well.

As you have probably seen, heard or read by now, Drug Court is a six-month
program for young people with nonviolent behavioral problems that involve
alcohol, marijuana or other drugs. If they and their parents agree to abide
by the program rules, the young people in the program come out not just
clean and sober, but without criminal records.

It's judicial "tough love," to be sure. But Drug Court Judge Warner Kennon
and Juvenile Court Judge Aaron Cohn, who has devoted a long and
distinguished career to trying to save young people who have run afoul of
the legal system, leave no doubt whose side this project is on.

"We care about young people who have a problem," Cohn said, "and we care
about their families."

The youths whose lives are turned around, and the families who see loved
ones they had lost to substance abuse healthy again, aren't the only
beneficiaries. There is the burden this approach can take off an already
clogged criminal court system. At the far end of that process is an even
more clogged prison system already bursting with, among the thieves and
thugs and killers, literally thousands of nonviolent drug offenders, many
of them young. In a legal system where the demand for "alternative
sentencing" has become almost a cry of desperation in recent years, here's
a form of it that seems to be working dramatically.

The cost of the three-year Drug Court project is $600,000, $475,000 of
which is covered by a federal grant. Compare that to the cost -- to the
rest of us -- of a single life of crime, a single life of imprisonment, a
single once-potentially productive life lost. In that context, does it seem
like a lot of money? Not from here.

Still, as Judge Cohn reminds us, the legal system can't do the job alone.
It's the whole community that benefits when these children are saved, and
the support of the whole community is necessary to save them.

It's in everybody's interest that this program succeed. So far, it would
appear, so good.