Grits for Breakfast Post

This is a wonderful post from a judge who admits that jurists are ill-equipped to handle the intricacies of addiction from the bench with normal punitive measures.

I have ... learned that, as a rule, we Judges have little or no training in the realities of addiction or alcoholism, and yet we are called upon to deal with persons who suffer from such maladies and to decide whether to punish these abusers with prison or try to rehabilitate them through probation. We have little or no background to know the answers to the real issues of addiction but we are empowered to sentence addicts and alcoholics who violate the law. We are robed, no doubt, because others saw in us something special, something that generated hope in the justice system, but we are not educated for the task of handling alcohol and drug abuse.

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