By ROBERT T. GARRETT / The Dallas Morning News
rtgarrett@dallasnews.com
AUSTIN – A nationally acclaimed program that has helped even the hardest-core addicts to sober up and stop committing crimes is vulnerable to state budget cuts.
A staggering 70 percent of the 72,000 offenders freed from Texas Department of Criminal Justice lockups last year were chemically dependent. And without treatment, they’re potentially a menace – to property and, in some instances, lives.
Many criminologists and others in the field say that groundbreaking work on drug and alcohol counseling and community supervision has proved so effective that it has prevented another Texas prison-building boom. But they fear that could change if lawmakers cut diversion programs as they tackle a projected $18 billion budget shortfall.
“We’ve saved money, kept the public safe, and we’re not getting the state in such a situation where they’re having to just open the doors of the prison and start pushing people out,” said Teresa May-Williams, assistant chief of probation in Dallas County, which has been a leader of Texas’ big push to treat nonviolent offenders’ addictions.
But the state’s incarceration rate would be “going straight up again – and it would be fast” if cuts were made, she said.
The diversion programs’ uncertain future demonstrates a potentially recurring problem: Cuts that lawmakers make now to prevention efforts – whether aimed at disease, child abuse, high school dropouts or ex-cons’ relapses into drug abuse – could cause long-term woes that cost more to address. The cuts also could cancel lively experiments praised by criminal justice experts around the country.
Texas’ offender population has decreased slightly since 2007, when the Legislature began investing more money in treatment, diversion and lower caseloads for local probation officers. State analysts project it to stay essentially flat at nearly 155,000 adults through 2015.
“It is reasonable to conclude those actions are largely responsible for the decline,” said Michelle Lyons, spokeswoman for the state criminal justice department.
Lawmakers and Gov. Rick Perry have ordered all state agencies to identify 10 percent in spending cuts over the next two years, preparations for tackling the budget gap next year. While the department has a few more weeks to fine-tune its cuts list and isn’t tipping its hand, backers of the treatment and diversion initiatives fear the worst.
They emphasize that community monitoring and treatment account for only a dime of every corrections dollar the state spends, with 80 cents still devoted to running prisons. And yet even deluxe treatment efforts cost less than one-third of what it takes to house a prison inmate, which is nearly $50 a day.
“Mr. Cottingham, I’m not God,” visiting Judge Robert Francis bellowed to a packed courtroom in Dallas late last month. “If we’re going to move forward, I’ve got to know you’re being honest with me.”
Lafamette Cottingham, summoned to the front of the courtroom from one of eight “sanction chairs,” bowed his head and began to sob. The young man, who’d failed a spot drug test, then confessed he used his second paycheck from a new job to get high.
Francis, who prowls the room like Maury Povich without a microphone, waved him back to his seat. An hour or so later, the judge ordered the man to spend six days in the county jail, though he allowed Cottingham to serve it on weekends so he could keep his job.
The retired GOP district judge is the unrivaled star of Dallas County’s “4C Court.” Life’s grittiest matters are openly aired in the Community Corrections Continuum of Care Court three days a week.
“No reality show can hold a candle to ours,” he said.
Francis and a staff of 22 drug counselors, case managers, snooping probation officers, clerks, lawyers and bailiffs operate a 1 ½-year-old state-financed specialty court. It tries to keep strongly addicted felons coming out of prison or state jails under intensive individual and group therapy – and 24/7 scrutiny.
No Texas judge has ever had a full docket of “re-entry” probationers who are trying to shake addictions. But a $2.6 million state grant gives Francis unprecedented resources to help keep them on the straight and narrow.
The court gives offenders temporary housing if needed. It also insists they avoid bad family situations, helps them find jobs, and subjects them to surprise visits and drug tests.
Every morning, even on weekends, participants have to call in to see if they are part of a group ordered to go to the George Allen Courthouse that day to undergo urinalysis.
Liza Estrada, 35, a recovering methamphetamine addict, said she got tripped up by two or three beers she drank the evening after her group had been drug-tested. Estrada said she was stunned the next morning, when the group was summoned for a second consecutive day of urinalysis. She tested positive and within days, she was sitting in agony on a sanction chair.
“It’s humiliating – I was bawling,” recounted Estrada, who graduated from the program and now helps her brother run a construction business.
Francis does not apologize.
“I’m sneaky, that’s my job,” he said. “I know they’re sneaky, too.”
Though very different in politics and style, Reps. Jerry Madden, R-Plano, and Jim McReynolds, D-Lufkin, may be the biggest fans of diversion efforts such as the 4C Court.
Madden, a West Point graduate who served in Vietnam, is an engineer and small-business owner. He headed the House Corrections Committee in 2007, when the state pivoted in a new direction, away from building more prisons.
It has 112. And three years ago, it trailed only three Deep South states – Louisiana , Mississippi and Georgia – in its incarceration rate, locking up one of every 71 adults.
Madden said that being tough on crime doesn’t require a one-cell-fits-all approach, which wastes money.
“The reason we’re successful is that we’re treating everybody as an individual and working on their individual problems instead of a mass-produced type effort,” he said.
McReynolds, a petroleum land man with a history doctorate and the impassioned piety of a Church of Christ deacon, gushes over the treatment pilots.
“They redeem lives and they save taxpayers’ money and promote public safety,” he said.
Both said the Legislature avoided creating about 17,000 more prison beds – construction alone would have exceeded a half-billion dollars – by boosting treatment and community supervision efforts. Lawmakers approved $162 million more for such programs four years ago; and last year, they added another $46 million.
Among other things, lawmakers decided to fix the Substance Abuse Felony Punishment program, a drug treatment effort for felons better known as “Safe-P.” It needed “after care,” or closer supervision and prolonged treatment after release, McReynolds said.
In Dallas, Francis’ court provides plenty.
Offenders must attend 12-step recovery groups near their homes three times a week, and collect signatures to verify they were there. They also must come to the courthouse to see a probation officer and a drug counselor and to attend group therapy. Francis said it’s all governed by a nationally recognized set of treatment principles that attack both addiction and criminal thinking.
In just more than 18 months of operation, 4C Court has revoked probation for only 7 percent of about 360 participants. Statewide, 27 percent of released inmates return to prison within three years, said May-Williams of the local probation department. She said the 7 percent probably won’t increase much because “the biggest risk is in the first year.”
Tony Hinshaw is among the sober 93 percent.
The Dallas man lost everything to meth and cocaine in a five-year downward spiral that netted him seven felony convictions for property crimes and drug sales. Hinshaw, 42, said he needed the in-prison component of Safe-P, which lasts six months.
Therapy changed his thinking, Hinshaw said, and when he got out, fear of Francis did the rest.
Several graduates recall being gratified by the amount of personal attention that Francis and his staff gave them, an experience they weren’t used to in the criminal justice system. But when Francis decides to lower the boom on an offender who repeatedly misses appointments and tests positive, he summons all participants to a formal courtroom hearing to watch. The sentences are heavy – 10, 25, even 40 years.
“That’s a real eye-opener,” said Hinshaw, now attending Eastfield Community College with hopes of becoming a drug counselor. “It’s a wake-up call.”
In May, the criminal justice department largely escaped a preliminary round of state budget cuts. But it, like other state agencies, must identify a possible trim of 10 percent. For the criminal justice department, that’s more than a half-billion dollars.
Spokeswoman Lyons, asked if diversion efforts will be among department programs potentially affected, didn’t respond directly.
“At this magnitude, all core agency functions would be impacted,” Lyons said. She declined to be more specific but said the department would make the fallout of any proposed cuts clear to state leaders. Madden and McReynolds said they’re confident the diversion efforts will be spared, if not by department leaders now then by state leaders in spring, when final decisions are made.
In Texas’ 2003 budget crisis, though, lawmakers whacked about $280 million – or about 6 percent – from the department’s two-year budget. They eliminated more than 1,200 positions and cut deeply into most rehabilitation programs.
“They cut everything that changed people’s lives,” recalled Ana Yanez-Correa of the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition, which advocates for less reliance on incarceration. “We can’t afford to go back.”