15 minute read
A Journey Through North Dakota's Drug Court
By Meg Luther Lindholm
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.
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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.
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.
To emphasize the fact, he repeats, “I just wasn’t good at it.” The blinders he once wore are now gone. “Everybody gets caught. It’s just a matter of time. I don’t know any successful drug dealers. I don’t know any successful addicts. Eventually it [drugs/dealing] will lead you to jails, institutions, or death.”
Clearly prison wasn’t serving its intended purpose of deterring his criminal behavior. The same is still true for many people convicted of drug crimes. In fact, the number of substance abusers who wind up in jail or prison has been skyrocketing in states across the country including North Dakota. According to Leann Bertsch, North Dakota’s Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (DOCR) director, approximately 75 percent of people in North Dakota’s prisons and jails suffer from a serious addiction. And North Dakota has the distinction of having the third-fastest-growing rate of incarceration in the country.
According to the Council of State Governments (CSG) Justice Center, North Dakota’s prison population grew 32 percent between 2005 and 2015, and its jail population grew 83 percent between 2006 and 2013. Bertsch puts the state’s recidivism rate at close to 40 percent. While not as high as the national average of 60 percent, it’s still high. Especially given the price tag of forty thousand dollars per year per prisoner.
Probation with mandatory treatment has also suffered under the strain of too few addiction counselors and too few probation officers—especially in rural areas. A survey of North Dakota judges conducted by the CSG Justice Center found that 70 percent of judges had sentenced low-risk, nonviolent substance abusers to prison in order to access treatment. Many of these were offenders who had violated the terms of their probation multiple times.
This perfect storm of high cost and high recidivism is what prompted DOCR Director Bertsch and others to call for change. “What are we trying to effect by using incarceration?” Bertsch asks. “We want people to desist from crime, and sometimes prison or jail is not the answer to get those individuals to change that behavior. In fact, putting someone in prison actually increases the likelihood of committing more crimes. So, I really think that jails and prisons have become a default answer to a problem that’s very complex but has better solutions than incarceration.”
This past spring, the North Dakota legislature voted to divert seven million dollars that would have gone toward more prison beds to increased drug treatment programs for offenders. The question now facing state government officials is how best to spend this money.
PROBATION ON STEROIDS
The program that worked for Stephens turned out to be drug court.
Drug court is an intensive, one-year probation program that offenders must apply to. Jennifer Hischer, Stephens’s probation officer, says the requirements and oversight offenders receive in drug court far outweigh what probation alone provides. “When you compare supervision of offenders who are in drug court to offenders that are on regular probation, the contacts are much greater in drug court,” Hischer says. “They’re seen by probation weekly. They’re drug tested anywhere between one and five times a week. They’re in treatment three nights a week. They see a judge weekly.” All of this on top of working full-time or being enrolled in school. Judge John Irby, who presides over one of Fargo’s two drug courts, refers to the program as “probation on steroids.”
By the time Stephens was offered the chance to apply to drug court, he had been to prison seven times. He was completely fed up with himself and his life. He was tired of using drugs and committing crimes, and he was estranged from family members whom he dearly loved. He wanted to get off the merry-go-round of incarceration but didn’t know how. Then he was arrested again. “This would have been my eighth time back in prison,” he says. “I didn’t want to go and I wanted something to change in my life, and I had heard good things about the drug court program.”
Drug court wasn’t created with serious repeat offenders like Stephens in mind. Rather it was intended as a diversion program for low-level drug offenders. However, the program’s success as demonstrated by high completion rates and low recidivism has led to its expansion. Now higher-level drug offenders like Stephens are encouraged to apply. North Dakota State University (NDSU) criminal justice professor Kevin Thompson says this is the right approach. “Drug courts should focus on high-level offenders, those most at risk to relapse. This is what saves the prison system money,” he says. “Low-level offenders would not be imprisoned anyway, and many of them do not feel that they have a problem. High-level offenders know they have a problem.” As Stephens’s probation officer Hischer says, “Prison was probably easy for Rob. This [drug court] was going to be his challenge.” The drug court Stephens was assigned to is presided over by Judge Irby in Fargo.
JUDGE JOHN IRBY’S DRUG COURT
It’s Thursday afternoon in Fargo, and a group of about twenty-five drug offenders sit in Judge Irby’s drug courtroom waiting to report on their progress over the past week. Some have brought their children, who seem to know instinctively to use their quiet voices. At 4:00 p.m., like a well-scripted play, Irby enters from stage left and takes his place up on the bench. His tone is friendly if businesslike as he calls each offender up to the front of the room to sit at a table across from him and the other members of the drug court team.
In addition to the judge, the team comprises a probation officer, an outpatient drug addiction counselor, and a mental health counselor. They have all met beforehand to discuss each offender’s progress over the past week. So again, like a well-scripted play, there are no surprises. The judge knows exactly who has stayed on and strayed off the drug court program. He peers down at one young woman and asks with a hint of exasperation in his voice, “Well, why don’t you tell me what’s going on with you?” Sounding contrite, the woman acknowledges what he already knows. “I hung out with people I shouldn’t have and I ended up using,” she says. He asks if she wants to continue with the program. Her voice is meek yet firm. “I need to and I want to. It’s the only thing that’s going to keep me in check,” she replies. He doles out what she knows is coming—a sanction of two nights in jail, to which she willingly agrees. Offenders who have stayed on track with their program get prizes that he pulls out of a fishbowl, like fast food coupons and court fee waivers.
“I like to think I’m there to encourage them to do what they need to be doing,” Irby says. “In the end, what I can do is dish out a measure of discomfort. I have told some I can’t make you responsible, I can make you miserable. But for the most part, I view my role as trying to encourage them to comply with the program, to turn their lives around.”
Thompson says the judge is often the glue who holds offenders accountable. “The judge is key. Each [offender] appears every week for the first three to four months before the drug court judge,” Thompson says. “With the right judge, these offenders get sucked into the process in a good way. It’s the first time they see a credible authority who cares about ‘me’ and my family.” NDSU assistant professor Andrew Myer agrees. “It’s not the punishment that counts—it’s the reinforcement of doing good things,” he says.
This intensive regimen has led to a track record of success. According to Thompson, the recidivism rate nationally for drug court graduates is far lower than for prison. “Recidivism rates five years out with released [prison] offenders will normally be in the 50 to 60 percent range,” Thompson says. “With drug courts, we see recidivism rates about half this number at the five-year mark.” North Dakota’s rate of recidivism for drug court graduates three years out is about 20 percent, which is about half the state’s prison recidivism rate. In many cases, the conviction that led to drug court is effectively expunged after successful completion of the program.
TRYING DESPITE HIS FEAR
Stephens was hugely fearful about whether or not he could make it through the rigors of drug court. “I was nervous because I didn’t feel like I would do very well in the program,” he says. “It was a very strict program that requires a lot of commitment, and I’ve had a history in my life of giving up on things when they got tough. It seemed like a very daunting task at the beginning for a person who did not live by life’s rules very well.”
Stephens’s drug court probation officer, Jennifer Hischer, also remembers how discouraged he was initially. “When I screened him for drug court, he was very down,” she says. “I remember specifically him telling me that he was a loner and AA or any meetings would never work for him, and he was just very negative about his chances for success here simply because he had tried and failed so many times before.”
When asked why she felt he was a candidate for drug court given his record of failure, Hischer responded, “Probably because of his record of failure. I mean this is something that we hadn’t tried before, and he was willing to give it a try. And one of the things I like to stress to people is that I understand it sounds overwhelming and there’s nothing easy about this, but in the beginning, all we ask is that you just show up and you try. And he was willing to do that.”
With Hischer’s encouragement Stephens worked hard at the program.
He attended support group meetings, outpatient counseling sessions, and drug court hearings. He submitted to frequent and random drug tests. He held down a full-time job and obeyed a nightly curfew. Along the way, he got a lot of support and encouragement from his drug court team and the other people in recovery with him. About halfway through the year-long program, Stephens noticed a change in himself. “That’s when things really started to click for me, with making new friendships in the program and spending a lot of time with a lot of my group mates from drug court, and doing things that didn’t require anything but me to have a good time. And the happiness and joy that I was getting out of doing those things really started opening my eyes to what life could be like without using,” he says.
Hischer also noticed the shift in Stephens’s outlook. “I think with Rob, when I noticed the first real changes in him was when he started connecting with the community,” she says. “He got a really good sponsor. He started attending more meetings than we require and doing fellowship activities. And he just became excited about it. You know the people that we see succeed are the ones that really embrace that [involvement] and continue it long after drug court.”
THE SOUTH DAKOTA EXPERIENCE To date, there are only five drug courts in North Dakota’s larger cities, but some criminal justice experts say there should be more. For guidance, North Dakota might consider South Dakota’s example. According to Greg Sattizahn,
South Dakota’s court administrator, the state’s criminal justice system once faced many of the same problems as North Dakota. “Judges were sending drug offenders to prison in order to get them out of their communities and to get treatment,” he says. Incarceration costs were rising, and recidivism was high. The state legislature decided to allocate more funds for community addiction treatment services for drug offenders.
South Dakota court officials created more drug courts to serve as hubs through which to rehabilitate felony drug offenders, and the treatment infrastructure was expanded. The number of adult drug courts in South Dakota grew from one in 2007 to sixteen today. “They’re not everywhere, but there’s a pretty good distribution across the state in the medium to larger population centers,” Sattizahn says. But he points out that drug courts won’t work if the necessary treatment services aren’t in place. “These are treatment courts,” he says. Three years after graduation, the recidivism rate for drug court offenders in South Dakota is 16 percent, in contrast with a 40 percent recidivism rate for people released from prison over the same time period.
Thompson advocates setting up more drug courts in North Dakota via teleconferencing. “We could fund teleconferences like the medical school does, where patients appear on a TV screen or Skype and talk about their recovery with a physician or nurse,” he suggests. “Drug courts could do the same thing in Carrington, Wahpeton, Grafton, and places where they could reach offenders. You could hold hearings for five to ten people very easily this way.”
There are limits to the drug court model. Because of the rigors involved, offenders must apply to be in the program. Hischer says more people could benefit from drug court, “but [they] have to be willing to do it. The court doesn’t ever just sentence someone to it. You have to apply and have a good understanding of the expectations. It’s not for everybody.”
And there are critics of drug court who say that addiction is a public health problem that should not be treated within the criminal justice system. In a blog post for the Open Society Foundations, an organization chaired by George Soros, Margaret Dooley-Sammuli of the Drug Policy Alliance writes, “Incarcerating people for a relapse—a predictable and normal part of drug treatment—flies in the face of public health principles. Denying opioid-dependent individuals access to what might be the most effective treatment for them, narcotic replacement therapies including methadone and buprenorphine, and then incarcerating them for failing to do well is unconscionable. Most drug courts are guilty of both.”
Thompson responds that the laws have to change first. “Until we decide that drug use, possession, and distribution is not criminal [e.g., victimless crime],” he says, “we will continue to hold those who use these substances accountable criminally.”
A NEW BEGINNING
July 28, 2016, was one of the proudest days of Stephens’s life. That was the day he graduated from drug court. Everyone who mattered most was there—his dad, his wife, his stepkids, his friends, and his sponsor. He feels that drug court literally saved his life. “My addiction brought me to the brink of suicide. If I didn’t do drug court, I honestly don’t think I would be here today,” he says. “Drug court has given me my life back.”
MEG LUTHER LINDHOLM is a freelance radio/podcast writer and producer for outlets such as National Public Radio and Prairie Public Broadcasting. Since moving to Fargo from New York City in 2002, she has pursued projects that address social issues. Her most recent project, Journeys through Justice, funded by the North Dakota Humanities Council, focused on criminal justice reform in North Dakota.
