Drug Court - The Other Side of the Coin - Colorado Confidential

This in from Colorado Confidential:

The return of Denver's drug court this week has been hailed by everyone from the mayor to the district attorney to graduates of the program. The Denver Post's headline Friday read, "Drug court gives addicts 2nd chance," and the Rocky Mountain News announced, "Drug court called step for practicality. But while drug courts may benefit some people, not everyone thinks they're so hunky dory - a fact neither daily bothered to mention.

Although Denver's drug court officially began March 9, both stories appeared in Friday's newspapers because of a press conference held Thursday, during which Denver officials lauded the return of drug court and made several chosen graduates "available for interviews." While again, drug courts may very well help some people, there is opposition, and the media should look at them with a critical eye rather than simply repeating what's said at a press conference. Colorado Confidential brings you the other side of the story.

While proponents of drug courts say their purpose is to get people into treatment instead of prison, others disagree.

"It's real purpose is docket management" says Christie Donner, director of the Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition. "It's not matching people up with treatment."

Donner also believes drug courts just "widen the net" of law enforcement. She says there's no shortage of drug users on the streets to be caught, and drug courts allow them to be shuffled through the system faster. She says Denver's drug court helped the city clear out LoDo when it was being redeveloped in the early 1990s.

Morris Hoffman, a Denver District Court Judge since 1990, saw the widening net firsthand.

"In Denver, we grossly underestimated the enthusiasm with which our police and prosecutors would embrace the idea of the drug court. As a result, our projections of the number of drug filings in the new drug court were woefully understated," Hoffman writes in "The Drug Court Scandal," a scathing critique of drug courts published in 2000 in the North Carolina Law Review.

The number of filings in the drug court tripled after its first year, Hoffman writes.

Donner and Hoffman also say that fundamentally, drug court doesn't work.

"It's the slow road to prison," Donner says.

Kerri Rebresh :: Drug Court: The Other Side of the Coin
Colorado Confidential