[in justice]
[in justice]
A JOURNEY THROUGH NORTH DAKOTA’S
If you met Robert Stephens today, you would see a man who is friendly and outgoing with a stable job and a large, loving family. Yet for many years, his life took him to a dark place ruled by his addiction to drugs and alcohol. Stephens is one of thousands of people in North Dakota who has cycled in and out of prison because of crimes fueled by substance abuse. Yet prison couldn’t help him break free of his addiction or his drug-fueled crimes. What helped him finally kick his multiple drug habits and his criminal lifestyle was drug court. His journey is one that many drug offenders have followed. His story has a clear beginning, an agonizingly long middle, and a one-year ending, which has led him, fortunately, to a new beginning. THE BEGINNING Stephens’s addiction started with alcohol shortly after his twenty-first birthday. Always a loner, alcohol melted his shyness and helped him open up. “Really, alcohol was a stress reliever to calm my social anxiety,” he says. But the drinking, mixed with smoking pot, quickly became a necessity—one that made it hard for him to function normally. “Because I was out drinking all the time, I couldn’t get up for work. And it got to the point where I was just staying on friends’ couches all the time. I couldn’t pay bills,” he recalls. He began forging checks to pay for the rounds of nightly drinks while denying that his partying had morphed into a serious addiction. Denial is perhaps the toughest wall separating addicts from the help they need, according to Brenda Ross Phillips, an addiction counselor at Prairie St. John’s in Fargo. “Some people will say, ‘My life is going fine,’ and I’ll say, ‘Really? So, you’ve got charges, you don’t have a job, you’re couch surfing, and you think life is fine?’ They aren’t seeing what’s happening,” Phillips says.
By Meg Luther Lindholm
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One day, Stephens took a new car out for a test drive, copied the key, and returned to the lot two weeks later to steal it. By the time the cops caught up with him, there were multiple
warrants for forged checks, breaking and entering, and theft. He was convicted and shipped off to the state penitentiary in Bismarck. Prison wasn’t all that hard once he adapted to the dull routine of life behind bars. And prison did nothing to steer him away from crime once he got out. The only difference was that he began committing bigger crimes to support a more serious drug habit that grew to include methamphetamines. His professional vocation became largescale drug-dealing. “I drove down to Minneapolis several times a week to pick up large quantities of meth and marijuana,” Stephens says. “I had to deal thousands of dollars of drugs a day to provide for my lifestyle—my addiction to drugs, my addiction to gambling, buying cars, taking people out to eat, going on trips with people—everything to provide everybody with an outlook that hey, my life was okay, without them knowing what was really going on.” In hindsight, Stephens knows he wasn’t fooling anyone. And inevitably, like a house of cards, his lifestyle collapsed with each new arrest and return to prison. “I was never good at being a criminal. I got caught for everything I did,” he says.
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