Since taking his first puff of marijuana as a 9-year-old, David L. Thompson figures that he’s smoked, snorted or shot up almost every kind of drug there is.
“By the time I was 13, I was pretty much a hard-core addict,” Thompson said. “Anything and everything, I was doing it.”
On the night of Jan. 15, 1995 – in what Thompson now calls “divine intervention” – he was pulled over and busted before he could smoke the crack cocaine he had purchased minutes earlier at a Northwest Roanoke housing project.
Thompson could have been just another statistic in the war on drugs.
Instead, he became the first person to enter Roanoke’s Drug Court, a new treatment program that gives addicts and small-time dealers a chance to kick their habits while avoiding a prison sentence.
Thompson, 34, is now drug-free, working as a building contractor and living with his wife and three children in a suburban West Salem home – none of which would have been likely, he believes, had he not been arrested and put in Drug Court.
Last month, holding a certificate he had just received as one of the first five graduates of the long-term program, Thompson said: “I have no doubt that my life is a lot better than I ever thought it would be, and for that I’m very grateful.”
* * *
On an April afternoon in 1994, Circuit Judge Diane Strickland was working out on the treadmill at the YMCA when Henry Altice walked up.
Altice, director of the Hegira House drug treatment center, was just back in town from a conference. A presentation on drug courts had intrigued Altice, and he asked Strickland if such a program could be started in Roanoke.
“I had heard about them vaguely, but I had virtually no knowledge of what the system was all about,” Strickland recalled. But the more she heard, the more she became convinced that a drug court could work in Roanoke.
The time seemed right in several respects.
Seven years after crack cocaine first infiltrated Roanoke, it was clear that incarceration alone would never solve the city’s drug problem. The lure of easy money seemed to breed a new crack dealer for every one arrested, and the drug’s addictive power was leading more people to rob, steal and deal to support their habits.
Then, in 1995, parole was abolished in Virginia. With the state’s prisons quickly filling up with violent and repeat offenders, localities were forced to look for alternatives for small-time drug dealers and addicts – the type of offenders that clog caseloads but rarely receive long prison sentences.
Similar trends have led courts across the country to shift from punitive to rehabilitative approaches. The idea is to attack the problem’s root cause – addiction – rather than its effects – criminal charges.
Since the first drug court was created seven years ago in Florida, more than 100 localities have followed suit, according to Marc Pearce of the National Association of Drug Court Professionals in Alexandria.
And some localities are considering applying the drug court model to other offenders, such as domestic abusers and drunken drivers, Pearce said.
After Altice’s suggestion, Strickland spent the next year working with other judges, probation officers, defense lawyers, prosecutors and substance abuse counselors. By the summer of 1995, they had a plan.
Starting in September of that year, people charged in Roanoke with possessing drugs or selling small amounts to support their addiction were given an option: plead guilty right away and receive treatment instead of jail time.
In January, the program was expanded to include people arrested in Roanoke County and Salem.
“The philosophy is that a person is more prone to drug treatment at the time of a crisis in their lives, and certainly an arrest is a crisis in their lives,” said Norborne Berkeley, director of the Drug Court.
The program, which lasts at least one year and as long as two, uses a variety of counseling and treatment tools to get people off drugs and employed. Throughout the program, they are tested for drugs at least three times a week and monitored by a judge in regular Drug Court sessions.
Defendants with long or violent criminal records, and those who were selling drugs solely for profit, are not eligible. The commonwealth’s attorney decides who can enter the program.
Once they are enrolled, offenders are told they must do three things to stay in the program: don’t use drugs or alcohol; get a job and keep it; and attend all of their counseling and treatment meetings.
If they succeed, the charge against them is dismissed or reduced. If they fail, they are kicked out of the program and returned to court to be sentenced on their original charges.
Although it’s still too early to call the program a success, Strickland said she is “cautiously optimistic” about the results.
Of the 84 people who have entered Drug Court so far, only seven have been kicked out for having new charges filed against them or repeatedly testing positive for drugs – a failure rate of about eight percent.
By comparison, about 40 percent of offenders on regular probation either test positive for drugs or have new charges filed against them.
Why the difference? For Thompson, it was the knowledge that he was being constantly watched, whether via urine screens for drugs, by counselors or probation officers in mandatory meetings, or by the judge in court sessions.
Thompson had tried treatment before, in a private facility in 1994. But he soon went back to drugs.
“I didn’t have anything like what they had with the Drug Court program, where someone is always saying ‘you have to report to me three times a week and you have to do this and you have to do that,'” he said.
“I needed to be constantly kicked in the butt with a reminder of where I came from, and the possibility of going back.”
* * *
Judge Strickland beamed as she listened to a young man on the witness stand describe how he had not only stayed off drugs for the past few weeks, but found a job as well.
“Good. Excellent. That’s outstanding,” the judge said.
Offering that kind of positive reinforcement was an adjustment for the Drug Court judges and probation officers, who were more accustomed to chastising defendants or throwing them in jail. In Berkeley’s old job as a probation officer, “if you weren’t chewing them out, you were saying ‘OK, we’ll see you next time’ – instead of telling them they were doing a good job,” he said.
Drug Court defies the adversarial nature of the court system in other ways.
Prosecutors tend to be uneasy about letting drug offenders escape jail time, and defense attorneys can be equally hesitant to let their clients plead guilty immediately, before they know the strengths and the weaknesses of the case against them.
But with Drug Court, “you find yourself working as a team with the prosecutor and defense attorney,” Strickland said. “All three of you have the same goal – to get the person healthy again, to get them out of the legal system, and to reduce any threat they might pose to the community.”
Drug Court is not all smiles and compliments, though.
When a man named Jerry had to explain to Judge Clifford Weckstein, who splits the Drug Court docket with Strickland, why he had tested positive for smoking crack over the weekend, it prompted the following exchange:
Jerry: “I made the mistake of going into the wrong environment. But I don’t blame the people in the environment; it was my fault.”
Weckstein: “A person could ask you, ‘Jerry, how dumb are you?’ But you should already be asking that question to yourself.”
Jerry: “Yes sir, I am.”
Weckstein: “Are you working this weekend?”
Jerry: “Yes, I am.”
Weckstein: “It will be hard to work if you’re in jail. Do we need to go that far?”
As it turned out, Jerry escaped with a warning. But it’s not unusual for a drug court participant to be sent to jail for a weekend, or be ordered to perform community service after testing positive for drugs.
Using drugs once, twice and even three times will usually not get someone kicked out of the program. So how often is too often?
“We don’t have any real bright lines there, because we need to allow for the facts and circumstances of the individual offenders,” Strickland said. For example, the judge would be more tolerant of a woman who used drugs in a moment of weakness after being abused by her husband than with someone who decided to go out on a Saturday night and get high.
Given the nature of addiction, some failures are expected. Earlier this year, 30 percent of the Drug Court population had tested positive for drugs over a two-month period.
“For the most part, it’s taken these people years and years of drug abuse to get to where they are,” Berkeley said. “We’re not going to undo that in a short period of time.”
* * *
The drug dealer was late.
Twenty minutes after his first group therapy session had started, he walked into a small conference room in the Roanoke probation office – carrying an attitude along with his soft drink, burger and fries from McDonald’s.
Ted Petrocci, a Drug Court counselor who was leading the session that night, told him food was not allowed.
The young man said nothing as he placed the food on the floor beside his chair, but the way he rolled his eyes seemed to ask: “What am I doing here?”
He asked the question aloud half an hour later, after listening to Petrocci lead five men through a discussion about how their personalities had been affected by drug abuse.
“I don’t think I fit in this program,” he said, explaining that he had never indulged in the drugs he sold. “Y’all be talking about stuff I never did.”
“Well, you were selling it to other people,” Petrocci countered. “So it might be a good idea for you to know what it’s doing to other people.”
It was the kind of free-wheeling “verbal judo” that Petrocci strives for. He leads discussions, not lectures. “You don’t change someone’s attitude by telling them they have a bad attitude,” he said after the session.
“Our role is not to make them believe anything. It’s just to say, here are your options. You can keep going where you’re going, or you can change your behavior.”
Drug Court treatment can be as varied as the problems that put people there. On entering the program, offenders are evaluated to determine what kind of treatment they need. The options include anger control, learning to read and write, conflict resolution, parenting and family skills, money management or intensive substance abuse treatment.
As a rule, Drug Court participants start off attending three meetings a week, although the judge can reduce the number as they move through the program.
* * *
Drug Court has put Roanoke on the legal map of Virginia.
In the past year, court officials from across the state and beyond have come here to observe the program, some with plans of emulating it in their own cities and counties.
When the first five graduates received their certificates on Sept. 30, more than three dozen Circuit Court judges were watching. The attention has brought questions and, from some, criticism.
After watching glowing reports from about 15 Drug Court participants, a Newport News judge asked if perhaps Roanoke was being too selective in deciding who can enter the program. “It seems to me that you’re taking the cream of the crop, and that most people will not be able to get into this program,” he said during a question-and-answer session with Strickland.
Others have the opposite concern.
Roanoke Commonwealth’s Attorney Donald Caldwell fears that some of the participants have criminal records so long, or addictions so strong, that they are not suited for the program. In trying to meet a target of 100 participants during the first year, Caldwell said, his office has let some questionable cases slip through.
“We’ve got to get a base on which to evaluate the program, so in some instances we’re taking a chance,” he said.
But there has been little criticism from people like David Thompson, who speak from personal experience.
“There’s no doubt in my mind that if it wasn’t for the Drug Court program, I would probably still be using, in one form or another,” Thompson said.
“Where would I be now? Probably on the wrong side of some daisies.”