On the night of Feb. 22, outside the restaurants and nightspots of Roanoke’s City Market, Mary Arnold found her own entertainment.
Arnold, a hard-drinking drifter whose life on the streets has produced more drunk-in-public arrests than can easily be counted, plopped down on the floor of the pedestrian walkway next to a large potted plant.
She leaned back against the wall, lit a cigarette and drank from a bottle of Cisco, a fortified wine so potent that it has been called “liquid crack.”
“I was sitting there with my pack of Newports in one hand and my Cisco in the other,” Arnold said. “I was having a party with the rich people who were going up and down the hall, just having a good time.”
Until a police officer showed up.
“And then along comes Mr. Boogie Man who hasn’t made his quota for the day, and he ruined the whole thing.”
Arnold’s arrest that night was like any other of the thousands of drunk-in-public charges filed in Roanoke each year – except in one respect.
In December, a judge entered interdiction orders against Arnold and three others, making it illegal for them to purchase, possess or consume alcohol because of their status as “habitual drunkards.”
With Arnold’s arrest, all four have now lived up to their titles.
“We’re disappointed, but we’re not surprised, ” Assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney Mary Blaney said.
When Blaney filed petitions to declare Arnold, Herman Cumbee, Frank Graham and Wayne Strickland habitual drunkards last year, it was the first time Roanoke authorities had used the state interdiction law in more than 20 years.
The speed at which all four people were charged with violating the order illustrates just how difficult it is to deal with a small group of hard-core drinkers who account for a large portion of downtown’s problems with loitering, littering, panhandling and public displays of drunkenness.
“There are about 20 people who are generating about 85 percent of the complaints, ” said Maj. R.D. Shields of the Roanoke Police Department. Strict enforcement has made Roanoke the state’s top city for drunk-in-public arrests, and interdiction is just the latest weapon.
But some question whether the law – which carries up to 12 months in jail for simply holding a bottle of booze – is the right response to an issue that has as much to do with health problems as it does with criminal conduct.
“Alcoholism is a disease, and the state needs to be putting its efforts into treating it as a health problem, ” said Kent Willis, executive director of the Virginia chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union.
“It’s par for the course in Virginia that the state refuses to acknowledge alcoholism and drug abuse as a health problem, and reacts primarily with punitive measures which in the end are not effective, ” he said.
Roanoke authorities have said all along that they do not expect theinterdiction law to prevent drunks from drinking. At best, they say, locking up the “worst of the worst” public inebriates will only slow them down.
“At least for the month or so that they’re in jail, they’re not creating problems for us on the streets, ” Shields said.
And there are efforts underway to provide more treatment. Roanoke Sheriff George McMillan, who expects an influx of chronic drinkers into his jail as a result of the interdiction law, is requesting permission to use already-approved grant money through the Department of Criminal Justice Services for a new program.
Fashioned after the jail’s successful “Alpha” treatment plan for drug addicts, the program would house alcohol abusers in the same living quarters of the jail for more intensive supervision.
During the day, participants would clean up public areas and do other work through the jail’s inmate community service program. McMillan hopes to secure up to $160,000 in available grant money for the program, which would require hiring a sheriff’s deputy to supervise the work during the day and a counselor to provide treatment at night.
In the future, when people go to jail for violating an interdiction order, “I’m hoping to not just let them come in here and sit, ” McMillan said.
So far, the standard sentence for violating an interdiction order has been four months in jail, a term that Cumbee and Strickland are currently serving.
Graham, the first of the habitual drunkards to be charged with going back to drinking, pulled his time, was released last month and promptly got arrested again. He’s back in jail, awaiting a March 19 hearing on his second interdiction violation.
Graham, who said in an earlier interview that he sometimes drinks aftershave and Listerine when he can’t get liquor, had vowed to keep drinking and even go to drugs if charged under the interdiction law.
It is not uncommon for Graham and other street people, who frequent homeless shelters at night and the market area by day, to log more than 100 drunk-in-public arrests a year. Court records also show a plethora of other charges, including trespassing, panhandling and urinating in public.
Just how bad is the problem? When a 10 a.m. hearing was held in Roanoke Circuit Court for the first interdiction hearings, court officials had a police officer armed with an alca-sensor standing by, just in case it was needed to tell if someone was too tipsy to testify.
Since the first four people were declared habitual drunkards in December, Blaney has filed petitions asking for interdiction orders against seven other people. Authorities have a group of about 20 people in mind for the process.
Interdiction – which received strong support from downtown merchants concerned that public drunks are bad for business – began about the same time that police started enforcing an ordinance that makes it illegal to sit on tables at the City Market.
The table-sitting law, which police have used on just a handful of occasions, has been lambasted by defendants and others, who call it a heavy-handed attempt to purge the market of young people with multi-colored hair and body piercing.
City officials, however, say the ordinance was designed to address legitimate concerns about large groups of unruly young people who gather on the market, impeding pedestrian traffic, littering and painting graffiti on buildings.
Willis said both the interdiction law and the table-sitting ordinance are examples of a statewide trend of city officials trying to cleanse their public areas of so-called “riff-raff.” Such laws also take the form of curfews for teen-agers and prohibitions against begging, Willis said.
“If there is a theme to inner-city ordinances over the last several years, it is anti riff-raff, whether it applies to homeless people, kids or others who are simply hanging out in public places, ” Willis said.
While the state American Civil Liberties Union has not challenged the interdiction law, the West Virginia chapter has.
In 1993, the ACLU filed a lawsuit in federal court, claiming that people with drinking problems in Mingo County were “stigmatized with a badge of infamy” when the local prosecutor distributed a list of their names to liquor stores.
The case was settled after the prosecutor agreed to withdraw the list, according to Joan Hill, a Logan, W.Va., lawyer who filed the suit.
“For some people, the stigma of this archaic term, habitual drunkard, was something they didn’t appreciate, ” Hill said. “Being labeled with something like that would probably drive them to drink even more.”
Just ask Mary Arnold.
“The law is ineffective, ” she said last week in a telephone interview from the Roanoke City Jail, where she has been held since her arrest. “I had that hanging over me, but it didn’t work … It’s made my alcoholism progress and progress and progress to where it’s almost killed me.”
“There’s no sense in anybody being in jail over a bottle of Cisco, ” Arnold said. “This is not fair.”