The following article was written for Reentry Central by Jennifer Hulvat:
Rehabilitative courts, such as drug courts and mental health courts, use court-involved treatment models to address the root cause of criminal activity. In other words, this approach accomplishes more than “treating the symptom” – rather, it addresses the very reason the offender committed a crime in the first place.
Rehabilitative courts reduce the budget for correctional involvement of these offenders. Local, state, and even federal spending should focus on support of rehabilitative courts instead of building more jails, prisons and treatment centers.
According to a report by the Office of Justice Programs, National Institute of Justice, on the impact of drug courts on recidivism and cost (http://www.nij.gov/topics/courts/drug-courts/work.htm), researchers have found that drug courts “reduce recidivism among program participants compared to comparable probationers.” In one study within a single county, researchers discovered a decrease from 50 to 35 percent for felony re-arrests. In another study, the felony re-arrest rate dropped from 40 percent to 12 percent after the inception of a drug court.
Think of how much these courts save not only the legal system, but also members of the community, who are less likely to become victims of crime by repeat offenders. “Compared to traditional criminal justice system processing, treatment and other investment costs averaged $1,392 lower per drug court participant,” according to The Office of Justice Programs, National Institute of Justice.
The success of rehabilitative courts is being recognized throughout the criminal justice process – more and more are spring up around the country. In February 2011, 1,829 drug courts had been in operation over two years, with 364 newer drug courts and more than 200 being planned in the United States (BJA Drug Court Clearinghouse Project, "Summary of Drug Court Activity by State and County," [Washington, DC: American University, Justice Programs Office, February 2, 2011], p. 120. http://www1.spa.american.edu/justice/documents/2812.pdf
In my role as a Chicago attorney, I have seen represented offenders whose lives appeared to be in shambles – individuals who had lost the respect of their families, their social standing, and, indeed, their hope for the future.
The examples here are only three of the successes that have resulted from rehabilitative court processes (their names have been changed to protect their privacy). Clearly, as a nation, we need to make the transition from the “nothing works” approach to “root cause remediation.” Advocating for the implementation of more rehabilitative courts will allow us to do that.
James
James, the teenage son of a well-known car dealership tycoon in the western suburbs of Chicago, arrived in drug court with a widely recognized last name. At the time of his application to drug court, all anyone had to do was turn on the television to see his father selling cars from another of his dealerships.
James was a heroin addict. The product of privilege and wealth, his access to club drugs and heroin appeared to be never-ending. After his third felony arrest for heroin, he was approached about the possibility of entering drug court. While he was resistant to the idea at first, it was clear that, at the beginning, he saw drug court as a way to avoid incarceration.
His journey, however, changed his life, and the lives of those who cared for him. He entered drug court by signing a simple contract that he would get clean in two years and avoid prison.
His “Phase I” experience was certainly an eye-opener. With the usual manipulative attempts at excuses and his resistance to surrender to his own recovery, he found himself the subject of internal sanctions by the court several times. One of those sanctions resulted in a 45-day stay in the local jail.
It was that sanction that prompted his affluent, and clearly uninformed father to approach me, the prosecutor in charge of the court, in a frustrated and angry state. He informed me that I clearly had no idea what I was doing to his son, and that a jail sanction was, in his words, “cruel and unnecessary” because James needed help, not jail.
For James, though, that jail stay was, in effect, a tremendous wake up call. As he re-entered the residential treatment facility after his jail stay, he appeared humble and truly prepared to engage in his own recovery. He did, in fact, progress through Phase I, through the long-term residential placement, and eventually to a halfway house and independent living facility.
James graduated from drug court after 2 ½ years in the program. He still is sober, working in one of his dad’s dealerships, and grateful for the opportunities that drug court provided.
Linda
Linda came to the mental health court after attempting to end her own life in the front seat of the car in which she was living. Clearly wrought with depression and bipolar disorder, she felt that she had nowhere to turn. She was arrested and brought to court after she stole food.
Linda was diagnosed by the team, counseled by her public defender as to the legalities of the program, and was quickly wrapped in the mental health treatment services provided by the county’s health department. She was released from jail and moved into an inpatient facility within three weeks of her arrest.
Step No. 1 involved extricating Linda’s life from the car she had called home for months, a difficult task for a person physically and emotionally attached to her “home.” With the utmost respect for her emotional state and this “home” she so valued, Linda and her case worker set out, on several visits, to slowly remove her valued possessions from the car, relocating them each time to the room she now shared at the residential facility.
Remarkably, the team slowly came to realize, as Linda regained her balance and stability through drug therapy and clinical intervention, that she was an established and insightful writer. From her vehicle, manuscript after manuscript emerged that clearly reflected the talent and productivity that had been masked by her mental illness for so long.
Linda’s two-year participation in mental health court was incredible. The team watched, and supported, as she regained the balance in her life. She was so grateful for the opportunity to utilize the clinical tools and behavioral modification counseling to return to a safe and productive place in her life. Linda did, indeed, graduate from mental health court, thereby avoiding her felony conviction. She no longer lives in her car, and now shares a two-bedroom apartment with a roommate. Perhaps most importantly, Linda is a published and working author.
Mark
Mark’s family retained my law firm to represent him after he was arrested, for the seventh time, on a felony cocaine charge. The state’s attorney indicated, during our initial negotiations, that the state would seek a prison sentence in the area of five years if Mark were convicted.
I knew, when I first visited Mark in jail after his arrest, that he was withdrawing from his addiction right before my eyes. Dressed in his orange jail uniform, he shook violently while he sat shackled to the interview room chair. As he shivered, avoiding my eyes directly, he begged me to get him out of there, to do anything I could to get him out of jail.
Mark’s family had the money to bond him out, but I advised them, very carefully, what the consequences of doing so would be. I knew what Mark needed to do and staying in jail was the only way to do it.
A painful three weeks later, Mark asked me to look into the possibility of participating in drug court. I was way ahead of him, having already approached the drug court prosecutor to discuss the specifics. My concern was not the legalities of the contract; it was Mark’s true realization of the journey ahead of him. I knew that drug court was the real thing, and that doing five years of hard time in the penitentiary was going to be a walk in the park compared to his road to recovery. Mark, however, had no idea.
Mark entered the drug court program wearing that same orange jumpsuit. He no longer was shaking because he had benefited from a complete detoxification in jail and six weeks of participation in the in-house jail program. He already had undergone an extraordinary transformation.
Hardly anyone expects drug court to be an easy journey -- we’ve learned that relapse throughout the process is part of recovery. Mark, however, was an unusual case. From his admission to an inpatient, long-term recovery facility to his move to independent living 15 months later, Mark was a textbook demonstration of commitment. While he certainly had his bumps along the way, Mark’s determination to regaining his life never wavered.
Although I left private defense practice and the firm that represented Mark several years later, I did learn that Mark graduated from the program and began to work as a counselor, attempting to inspire those who sat where he once did, to regain their lives.
Some five years later, I had chosen to return to the prosecutor’s office that now manages that very drug court for the state. During one of the twice-yearly graduation ceremonies, the drug court coordinator announced a very special guest speaker.
I watched proudly as Mark took the stage, speaking so eloquently about his journey to sobriety and how he had been inspired to help others realize that sobriety was possible. At the end of his talk, he looked at me in the audience (I was now carrying a badge as a prosecutor, not a briefcase as a defense attorney), and he thanked me. He thanked me for believing in him, he thanked me for not bonding him out of jail when he begged me to do so, and he thanked me for choosing to make a difference as a lawyer.
There I sat, stunned at the transformation, clearly moved by his gratitude, and as committed to rehabilitative courts as I’ve ever been.
They say that prosecutors should never hug defendants. I made an exception that day.
Since 2009, attorney Jennifer Hulvat, from the Chicago area, has been a full-time faculty member at Kaplan University, where she also serves in the critical role of internship coordinator. Before that, she served Kaplan University as an academic department chair who supervised the Law and Fraud cohort of adjunct instructors. Additionally, she coordinated and interviewed undergraduate internship candidates and became a liaison with law-enforcement agencies on a national level. She joined Kaplan as an adjunct instructor in May of 2005.
Jennifer was a staff attorney for Chicago’s CLEAR Initiative Project, an aggressive, non-state-funded project to review, edit and align the Criminal Code and the Unified Code of Corrections in Illinois. She has spent a majority of her 22-year legal career as a prosecutor, both in Illinois and Florida. Along with her teaching responsibilities, she currently practices criminal law as a private defense attorney in both federal and state courts throughout Illinois.
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