BIG CITY IDEAS FIGHT SMALL TOWN CRIME

IDAHO CITY, Idaho, March 1 -- It all started when Bill London, a state game
warden, stopped a man for fishing illegally in a pond in this rural,
mountainous area north of Boise and found he had a ball of methamphetamine,
the size and color of a Ping-Pong ball.

Mr. London did not like it that some of the drug dealers who have invaded
rural Idaho in the last few years were hanging out at the pond, spoiling
the fishing for families. So he went to the local judge, Patricia Young,
who was looking for new ways to combat the spread of drugs, violence and
poverty in her county. They came up with a plan: instead of sending people
with minor criminal charges to jail, the judge would sentence them to fix
up the pond.

Some contractors caught poaching elk had to donate their time and heavy
equipment to build a sand beach beside the pond. People stopped for drunken
driving were ordered to plant trees and flowers and water them with buckets
carried by hand from the pond. Others were ordered to build a volleyball
court and a sheltered picnic bench. The Idaho Department of Fish and Game
deepened the pond and restocked it. The fishing was so good and the pond so
attractive that "the dopers left and the sportsmen and families came back,"
Mr. London said.

But in helping to drive off the drug dealers, and in introducing a panoply
of other programs, Judge Young has put into practice some of the most
talked-about ideas in criminology, theories like problem-solving policing
and community justice, which were developed in and for big cities.

Her innovations have occurred at a critical time, as many parts of rural
America are experiencing a drug epidemic and rural law enforcement
officials find themselves too few in number to stop it.

"Just making more arrests isn't going to work," Judge Young said, sitting
in her old redbrick courthouse, which was built in the 1870's in Idaho's
gold rush, when Idaho City was briefly the largest settlement in the
Pacific Northwest. Her county, Boise County, covers almost 2,000 square
miles, most of it national forest, with its three small towns separated by
a narrow mountain road that is often closed by snow in winter. There are 11
sheriff's deputies for 6,670 residents, and sometimes only one deputy is on
duty.

"We simply can't find and arrest all the addicts and dealers, so we have to
engage other members of the community if we want to create a safer and
healthier county," Judge Young said. She has come to emphasize prevention,
drug treatment and community justice, getting victims and defendants to
agree on punishment, usually a combination of fines and community service,
ideas she learned about after winning a grant from the federal Justice
Department to help rural areas.

"What is important is getting a sense of local ownership, so that people
who come to court feel they have a say in sentences, and they start to do
things like protect the pond from drug dealers," she said. "We're still
small enough that this works."

Judge Young has pushed particularly hard for programs that help newborns
and children. "If we can't arrest all the dealers, we've decided to start
at the beginning," she said.

One program sends a nurse to visit every new mother at home, delivering
baby blankets and toys while assessing the family's situation. First-time
teenage mothers get special attention, with a trained home visitor checking
in once a week to offer advice and watch for possible child abuse or neglect.

Trudy Jackson, the owner of Trudy's Restaurant in Idaho City, runs a
network of volunteers who contribute things like clothes, blankets and
refrigerators for poor families with children, some of whom live in
isolated hollows. These areas provide good cover for cooking meth. Ms.
Jackson says helping people out of poverty is a way to prevent the spread
of drugs.

Judge Young also helped get financing for universal preschool starting at
age 3 in Boise County. Each family that participates gets a monthly home
visit by a trained volunteer. Since the program began three years ago, the
results have been encouraging, said Jamie Sims, an administrator and
teacher at Idaho City's elementary school. Of the participating children
now in kindergarten, 60 percent scored at grade level or above on Idaho's
standard reading test, Ms. Sims said, compared with 25 percent of those who
did not participate.

Not everyone likes what Judge Young is doing. Capt. Steve Bowers, the chief
deputy sheriff, said his officers complain that "our judge doesn't really
think drugs are illegal" because of her penchant for alternative sentences.
This reduces the officers' incentive for making drug arrests, Mr. Bowers
said. But a number of residents, including Ms. Jackson and Ric Call, owner
of Diamond Lil's Saloon, next to the courthouse, said the sheriff and his
deputies were simply not interested in going after drug dealers and meth
cookers.

"It's my single biggest gripe with the sheriff, that he doesn't do
something about drugs," Mr. Call said. "There's an attitude here of 'leave
me alone'; it's the old frontier thing."

Drugs have spread so widely, Mr. Call said, that he and other small-
business owners in town have a hard time finding reliable employees.

Even Captain Bowers speaks with a certain fatalism about drugs that
officers in other rural areas also express. "It's so frustrating," he said,
"that we kind of resign ourselves to the fact that we're not in a position
to do much."