DRUG COURT DISPUTE ENLIVENS PG COUNTY ATTORNEY'S RACE

There's a significant area of disagreement on policy shaping up in the race for
commonwealth's attorney of Prince George County. The official Republican Party
candidate, Cameille Cromer, and fellow Republican Jay Paul, running as an
independent in the November election, have taken diametrically opposed
positions on the issue of treatment/diversion courts, commonly known as drug
courts. The special courts, first funded in pilot programs by the federal
Department of Justice (DOJ), have been used around the country.

Paul said locally, Hopewell, Chesterfield, Colonial Heights and Dinwiddie have
them. The idea behind the courts is, in the case of a repeat offender who is
caught with user quantities of illegal drugs, society might benefit more from
closely-supervised probation coupled with comprehensive treatment for the user,
than simply addict prison time to an addict.

According to Paul, drug court sentences include more frequent checks on
compliance and random testing than traditional probation.

Paul has endorsed creation of a drug court in Prince George County. But at
Cromer's official web site, she comes out strongly against them, saying, "A
Drug Court would allow drug-possessing criminals the opportunity to escape a
conviction and would be a waste of tax money since any judge can already do
this under the present system.

Drug Courts are just the latest gimmick to be used as a false solution to a
host of criminal and/or socio-medical problems. A Drug Court uses taxpayers'
money to benefit criminals rather than law-abiding citizens, [and] does not
work because the majority of drug-abusing criminals continue using drugs and
continue committing crimes to support their habit."

Cromer states that the drug court sentence is a relative slap on the wrist,
compared to traditional courts.

Paul cites statistics, including the evaluation and final report from the North
Carolina Drug Treatment Court. Five pilot program courts began handling cases
in 1999 after receiving a grant from the DOJ. At the time of the evaluation,
one pilot program had "severe data quality problems," so data from the other
four, in Warren, Preston/Caswell, Wake and Mecklenburg Counties were used.

The study's outcome evaluation examined court and treatment attendance,
compliance with requirements to meet and work with case managers and probation
officers, drug test results, arrests in the program, rates of graduation from
the program and reasons for discharges of those who did not graduate. Finally,
a "quasi-experimental design was employed to examine the 12-month post-program
recidivism" rates.

Those rates were compared to the control group of offenders who were eligible
for the program but were not admitted. Amy Craddock, Ph.D., of Indiana State
University, wrote the evaluation and final report: she noted that the most
common drug abused by participants was cocaine. More 98 percent of participants
were diagnosed as "chemically dependent," and 70 percent had prior convictions.

Craddock writes that of the 534 participants in the study, 33 percent were
graduates of the program.

In regard to recidivism (rearrest) rates, Craddock notes that 41 percent of
non-graduates were arrested within a year of being discharged. That compares
with 18 percent of graduates, a reduction in the recidivism rate of over
one-half. Among offenders never treated under drug court intervention, the
recidivism rate was 44 percent. In conclusion, Craddock writes, "The most
important predictor of recidivism is Drug Treatment Court graduation."

A separate analysis based on results of a Dallas County drug court study sought
to assign a cost-benefit ratio of drug courts (called DIVERT Courts in this
jurisdiction). The analysis and study were done by Thomas Fomby, Ph.D., Vasudha
Rangaprasad, M.A., Ms. Monica Turley and Ms. Ashley Sibley of the psychology
department of Southern Methodist University. The study and followup analysis
was of 178 drug court participants, comparing them to 78 non-drug court
offenders as a control group, over a period of 27 months.

The object was to find out, based on recidivism rates of offenders, what the
treatment costs of the program were compared to savings to society when
offenders were not rearrested. Over a period of 40 months, the cost-benefit
ratio was determined to be 9.43:1. The study explains the ratio, stating, "for
every dollar spent upgrading drug treatment from the Control Group (traditional
adjudication) to drug treatment through DIVERT Court, $9.43 of costs can be
saved by society over a 40 month post-treatment program." The authors go on to
call that estimate "conservative."

Paul said the results of the two studies contradict Cromer's claims that drug
courts are either a gimmick or a waste of taxpayers' money. "I think you'll
find that many of our local commonwealth's attorneys, all of them
tough-on-crime Republicans, list creation of drug courts in their jurisdictions
as among their accomplishments," said Paul. "Statistics have shown that these
programs are effective when they're run properly.

It's irresponsible for a candidate for this office to not look at the
cost-benefit analysis. "

Paul further asserts that the costs of putting a drug user in jail are
manifold. "Besides the actual cost of keeping a prisoner in jail, $36 to $38
each day, you've got to consider his family.

If he's in jail, he can't support his family, and we all know who gets to do
that instead ... we the taxpayers," he said.

"And with the limited amount of drug treatment available in prison, all you're
really doing is bringing them in, drying them out and sending them back out to
do the same thing again.

That's what the differences in the recidivism rate studies show."

So far as drug courts giving criminals a "slap on the wrist," Paul said the
demands drug courts make on convicted users are both more stringent and more
productive than those levied under standard adjudication. "It's coerced
treatment," he said, "and coerced treatment works.

A drug court will require a user to pay child support, go to work, go to
treatment and see his probation officer as often or even more often than most
kinds of probation or parole.

This is not coddling criminals or going easy on lawbreakers.

To the contrary, the offender will have more contact with the judge and more
conditions to satisfy than with the non-drug court system.

They know if they don't do everything required, they will get at least the
sentence they would have gotten anyway, and the judge could impose a harder
sentence than what they've have gotten without drug court."

Paul said it's important to bear in mind that drug courts are only for multiple
time offenders who are not charged with manufacturing or selling drugs. For
first-time offenders, there are programs in place which put them on probation
and force them to take random drug tests for a year. After that, the conviction
is expunged from their record.

"But drug court is for the second, third, fourth time offender," said Paul.
"It's for someone who has perhaps not hit bottom yet, hasn't wrecked his car,
hasn't yet lost his kids or his wife or his job. That drug-user hasn't got the
motivation to go into treatment on his own. Using drug court to force that
person into treatment could save society a lot of money in the long run."
Responding to the studies and Paul's assertions, Cromer stated in a written
response, "The bottom line is that the "Drug Court" program does not create any
new statutory power that our current judicial system does not already have: the
judge can already sentence a person to probation or drug treatment if he or she
deems such appropriate."