Hug-a-thug pays off: drug courts aren't a panacea for drug addiction, but they have won hearts and opened pocketbooks in state legislatures.

Drug courts have joined the ranks of motherhood and apple pie as causes embraced by legislators, judging from votes on appropriations measures in a diverse array of states over the last several years.

Lawmakers from New Jersey and California to Oklahoma and Idaho have endorsed drug courts, which impose intensive, judicially monitored treatment in lieu of incarceration on criminal offenders with drug problems. Appropriation bills have sailed through those legislatures unanimously.

There are now more than 1,600 drug courts nationwide, up from about 100 a decade ago. There was only one in 1989, when officials in Miami opened the nation's first drug court at the height of the crack cocaine epidemic. Many drug courts were launched as pilot programs with three-year federal grants that started to run out about five years ago, leaving their fate in the hands of states and counties. According to the latest tally released by the National Drug Court Institute, legislatures in 35 states have appropriated funds to help fill the void.

State legislative support wasn't always there for the drug-court concept. At first, the treatment programs, which allow drug-addicted criminals to avoid spending time behind bars, were considered a touchy-feely social experiment that could easily label their backers "soft on crime."

"There was skepticism all the way up," says Judge Keith Starrett, formerly a state circuit judge in Mississippi who is now on the federal bench. "Law enforcement was skeptical and the legislature was skeptical. Lawmakers didn't trust anything that appeared soft on crime."

That misconception has been put to rest, says Starrett, echoing comments from officials in other states. Referring addicted offenders to drug courts is as effective and much cheaper than sending them to prison, they say.

WINNING HEARTS--AND FUNDING

Judges, looking for ways to stop the revolving door for drug offenders, tested the alternative in their own courts and discovered how effective the approach could be.

"A lot of people were calling it a hug-a-thug program," recalls Joseph Craft, drug court project manager with the Mississippi Administrative Office of the Courts. But drug courts, which require participants to attend counseling sessions and submit to frequent random drug tests, under the threat of stints behind bars for any back-sliding, "are a lot tougher than traditional probation," says Craft.

A report released by the Mississippi state auditor in 2003 pointed out that if 500 offenders were sent to drug court instead of prison, the state could save $5.4 million a year. The Legislature responded that year with a bill authorizing a statewide network of drugs courts and the following year with an appropriations measure funding them--to the tune of about $5 million for FY 2006.

The money for Mississippi's drug courts comes from a special $10 assessment on an array of felony crimes and misdemeanors, from driving under the influence to litter law infractions. The payments are funneled into a state fund from which a state advisory board makes allocations to county drug courts.

In Idaho, it was the prospect of a costly new prison to house a steadily growing number of inmates addicted to methamphetamine that put the Legislature in a receptive frame of mind in 2000.

"Judges had started drug courts pretty much on their own, working after hours," recalls Senator Brent Hill. "When we saw those judges going the extra mile, actually donating their own time, and coming in and sharing success stories with us, that is what got the Legislature motivated."

The Idaho Drug Court Act, along with nearly $1.6 million in funding, passed unanimously in both houses. The legislation imposes a wholesale tax on liquor sales to fund the courts. Since then, legislators have boosted funding twice. It's up to $3.3 million for FY 2006. The act has also been amended to include mental health treatment. It now authorizes the courts to extend the same treatment-oriented approach to criminal offenders with underlying mental illnesses.

DO DRUG COURTS WORK?

The national Drug Court Clearinghouse, a project of the Bureau of Justice Assistance housed at American University in Washington, D.C., has collected 66 studies published since 2000 that attempt to quantify the cost-effectiveness of drug courts. The widely varying results, almost without exception, demonstrate that drug courts are helpful even though they are not a panacea. A 2003 study in six counties in New York, for example, found that the reconviction rate among 2,135 defendants who participated in a drug court program was, on average, 29 percent lower over three years than for the same types of offenders who did not enter the drug court. ALas Vegas study published in 2003 found that 65 percent of drug court participants were rearrested within three years of leaving the program. Still, that was better than the 79 percent rearrest rate for members of the control group.

"Previously, we presented the Legislature with a report showing gains in employment, reductions in general assistance payments and medical costs," explains Judge Stephen Manley, a drug court judge in San Jose and president of the California Association of Drug Court Professionals. "But now, the only savings that the Legislature looks at is savings in prison bed days, which does not include savings from lower recidivism," he says.

By that measure, according to a 2005 report, California saved $1.31 for every $1 spent on drug courts, Manley says. The Legislature's contribution to drug courts, which number more than 200 and have about 10,000 participants at any given time, comes to $20 million in FY 2006.

PRAGMATISM ON THE GREAT PLAINS

Wyoming, which has one-seventieth the population of California and about 400 drug court participants, appropriated $4.5 million for drug courts for FY 2006, the highest per capita state contribution.

The Wyoming Survey & Analysis Center at the University of Wyoming, which is under contract to assess the drug courts' performance, found that in FY 2005, 98.1 percent of the 32,823 drug tests conducted were clean. The average period of sobriety between "dirty" tests was 182 days. And the in-program recidivism rate was 8.2 percent. Costs are less: $22 per person per day in drug court vs. $115 per day in the men's penitentiary and $135 in the state prison for women.

"We know we're not going to solve the problem, but we can ameliorate it a little bit," says Representative Doug Osborn, who sponsored the 2001 bill that launched Wyoming's drug courts. "What we were doing before was just having a revolving door in prison, which is hugely expensive. Even though drug courts are fairly expensive, it is way less than sending [addicts] to prison, when they're going to be at least as bad when you take them out as when they went in."

Mark Thompson is a free-lance writer from San Diego, Calif.