Audio By Carbonatix
Sometime this summer, the more than 1,000 people charged with felony drug offenses each year in Denver will begin flowing into a single courtroom on the second floor of the City and County Building. There, if everything goes according to plans now being finalized, William Meyer, a wiry and intense district court judge, will begin a radically new ap- proach in how the court system treats its drug offenders.
In an attempt to break what both drug and law enforcement experts say is a costly and inflexible way of handling the city’s drug users who commit crimes, or those who get caught with only small amounts of drugs, the judge plans to be at once more tolerant and more stern. Those who are busted for dealing drugs, he says, will receive swift punishment. Those who are caught simply possessing small amounts of drugs will be given greater opportunities to enter treatment–and to fail at it more often before Meyer gives up and sentences them to probation or jail.
Many people in the criminal justice system who have heard specifics about the special drug court are optimistic. They note that the number of Denver’s criminals who use drugs–usually cocaine–is swelling. They note that other cities, such as Miami, Oakland and New York, have installed similar courts with encouraging success.
Most important, though, they concede that current methods for disciplining cocaine, heroin and marijuana users just aren’t working. The number of addicts who make repeat appearances in court is growing. Too often, drug
users more pathetic than criminal end up shuffled behind bars, where their addictions thrive and the cost of warehousing them is high.
Meyer’s plan is not without its critics. They point to potential flaws–such as inadequate funding and not enough treatment facilities–that, if not corrected quickly, could turn a well-meaning experiment into another bleak treadmill for those it intends to help and an administrative nightmare for those running it.
The official attempt to get a handle on Denver’s drug habit begins in the Pre-arraignment Detention Center across from police headquarters on Cherokee Street. That’s where, every three months for the past four years, researchers for the federal Drug Use Forecasting project have conducted interviews of recently arrested men and women.
One recent afternoon Chris Webster, the project’s manager, and two assistants settled in to collect more information and urine from the suspects. The standard questionnaire consists of the front and back of a single sheet of paper, with a second page of questions devoted entirely to heroin. Webster says this was added a couple of years ago after reports of increased heroin use in the city began to filter back to the project.
The interviews are voluntary, but most of the detainees, who are escorted into the small, windowless room by a sheriff’s deputy, comply. In preparation for the day’s work, Webster breaks out a bag of Snickers bars. “We give them one if they give us a urine sample,” he explains. “The Division of Criminal Justice calls it an incentive. We call it a bribe. It’s amazing, the power of a candy bar.”
The first man interviewed is middle-aged, Hispanic, with a wispy goatee and mustache. He is wearing khaki pants, black leather high-top sneakers without socks, and a gray sleeveless shirt that reveals the tattoos on each of his arms and needle scars on his left arm. The entire interview takes about ten minutes.
In the past month, how did you mainly support yourself?
Drug dealing.
In the past month, how much money did you receive from all illegal sources?
About $35,000.
Are you now or have you ever received treatment or detox for drug or alcohol use?
Yes, at a methadone center, for heroin.
Do you feel that you could use treatment for drug or alcohol use now?
Yes, for heroin.
He adds that he spends about $400 a week on his tar-heroin habit, injecting it most every day, occasionally with cocaine–a speedball. He is given a Snickers and led to the bathroom with a bottle.
Next in is a well-dressed black man with sleepy eyes. He wears khaki pants and a dark sweater with a red collar poking out around the neck. He admits to spending about $40 a week on crack cocaine, which he says he started smoking several years ago. This is his first arrest.
Recently the project’s interviewers began handing out a list of treatment programs to the inmates. “We felt so helpless,” says Webster. “I mean, some of these guys start breaking down and crying. There have been times when we’ve led these people over to the phone and had them call one of these places. Most of them, who knows if they ever use it. But so many of these people obviously need help.”
He concludes: “There’s so little that’s positive about the system. There are so few success stories.”
Webster’s feelings, and the two recent interviewees, represent both the problem and the challenge of the city’s growing drug problem and Meyer’s special court. In 1990 about one-quarter of the men arrested in Denver for all crimes tested positive for cocaine.
Two years later the number had climbed to about 40 percent, and in May 1993 half of all of the men arrested in the city tested positive for cocaine use. (Nearly two-thirds of them tested positive for some sort of illegal drug.) Among women, the numbers are equally high: In 1992 half of all women arrested in Denver still had cocaine coursing through their systems, with more than six out of ten testing positive for some illegal drug.
The costs of such use are staggering, if not for the people who actually use illegal drugs, then for the system that must prosecute and then take care of them–not to mention the taxpayers who foot the bill. This year the City of Denver will spend $4 million tracking drug users and dealers; the Colorado Department of Corrections will spend more than $2.5 million treating and tracking drugs and alcohol inside its walls.
Colorado will also spend more than $43 million studying and treating drug-and-alcohol abuse problems this year. And those numbers don’t even begin to include the time and money that numerous drug agents, prosecutors, public defenders, probation officers and judges must spend processing the swelling mass of drug cases.
Much of the reason for the soaring costs is political. It is hardly a secret that many people–especially those who commit crimes–are on drugs. But as government officials began to prosecute as many people as possible strictly for the use of those drugs, the effort dragged down the court system.
From 1984 to 1990, Colorado’s total criminal case filings climbed 42 percent. During the same period, as the War on Drugs heated up, the number of felony drug-case filings soared by more than 200 percent.
Helen D. was 36 years old when, in November 1988, on the 800 block of 30th Street, she was arrested for attempting to sell a police officer a rock of crack cocaine smaller than a baby aspirin. She was sentenced to one year of probation. Officers handling the case recommended she receive drug treatment for an estimated $200-a-day cocaine habit.
Unfortunately, she didn’t quite get the hang of reporting to her probation supervisor. Her probation was revoked once in March 1990–she was merely resentenced to probation–and then again in July, when she was sentenced to one year in prison.
Last spring, to the surprise of no one, she was arrested again for attempting to sell $20 worth of cocaine to a police officer on Emerson Street. She pled guilty, and in November 1993 was sentenced to spend four years with the Department of Community Corrections, a halfway stop between probation and prison. A month later she walked away from the program’s Independence House without permission and didn’t return.
Last month police caught up with Helen D. once more. This time she was sentenced to six years in jail for bailing out of her Community Corrections sentence. Three weeks ago she was sentenced to another year, to be served consecutively, for escape, a felony.
Although the take-no-prisoners drug policy quickly flooded the court system, it didn’t tax the prison system–at least not initially. Like in many other states, Colorado’s serious criminal population has swelled faster than its prison space. As a result, the vast majority of low-level drug offenders don’t find themselves behind bars.
“The bottom line,” says Craig Silverman, a Denver deputy district attorney, “is that most people caught with drugs are sentenced to probation. There isn’t room in the Department of Corrections for first-time offenders.” From probation, many drug-possession cases move like a bulge through a snake, stressing the courts and the prisons as they pass along the way.
District Attorney Bill Ritter calls it “the criminal justice elevator.” Frequently, the person convicted of drug use violates his probation for missing an appointment with his officer and is dragged back into court, where, says Ritter, “he is moved to the second floor, Community Corrections.”
Many convicts continue to use drugs–and flunk out of the halfway houses. A 1991 study found that fully one half of the people who got kicked out of the Community Corrections program had logged some drug infraction.
More to the point for prisons, the study also found that 60 percent of the people who escaped left because they were on drugs or afraid of getting snagged by a random drug test. Because they are easily caught–and because escape is another felony–they, like Helen D., quickly get sent up the river for what began as low-level crimes.
The end result, says Kim English, who wrote the 1991 study, is a very common–and very surreal–trip from a simple drug-possession conviction to a long jail term. “These things keep you in the system for a very long time, just because you fell off the wagon,” she says. “It’s just kind of a bizarre thing that happens over and over again.”
The idea of more tightly linking the legal hammer of a court to the coaxing of treatment is not unique to Denver. Drug courts, in one form or another, have taken hold in nearly two dozen cities. One of the earliest and most famous of these is in Dade County, Florida, where in 1989 then-District Attorney and now-Attorney General Janet Reno in 1989 pushed for a special court to handle the epidemic of drug cases overwhelming Miami.
Meyer says he began envisioning a similar court for Denver nearly three years ago. But it wasn’t until last summer that the notion of transplanting the idea to Colorado’s busiest jurisdiction became a reality. That’s when District Attorney Norm Early retired from office.
Early (who now works for Lockheed Information Management Services Co. and who did not return calls from Westword) believed strongly in the same tough, cut-no-deals attitude toward drug use that was streaming out of Washington. This showed up in his attitude toward any and all drug cases that crossed his desk. Anyone caught using drugs, he believed–and instructed his deputies–should be punished with a felony conviction.
“Norm’s policy had always been, no matter how much or how it happened, he wanted a felony conviction–zero tolerance,” recalls Craig Truman, a defense attorney. “It resulted in some real incongruities–getting a felony conviction, for example, on the 19-year-old Phi Beta Kappa student who was driving home from school and was rear-ended and discovered to have some minimum amount of cocaine in his car.”
Truman adds: “Norm was very nearsighted, in my opinion. I mean, I’m not sure that giving a 19-year-old a felony conviction to hang around his neck for the rest of his life is the best use of our limited resources.”
“One of the biggest problems I’ve seen as a defense attorney,” agrees David Kaplan, “is how ridiculous it is to arrest a younger person, 18 to 25 years old, who was stopped for very minuscule amounts of drugs, at a point in their lives when they could still make something of themselves. And then they are given a felony with no anticipation that they will go to jail, just because of some knee-jerk policy that we’ve got to convict everyone.”
Unfortunately for Meyer and others who had concluded that the current system was not working, a specialized drug court in Denver required some leniency on the part of the district attorney. He or she would have to agree to hold off convicting a person caught with drugs while the offender navigated drug treatment.
Not surprisingly, when Meyer approached Early with the idea of more treatment for drug offenders instead of the same old conviction/probation, Early declined. “The district attorney,” recalls Chief District Court Judge Connie Peterson, “was not interested in a drug court.”
Meyer got another opportunity to make his pitch last year, when Early left office. Early was replaced in June by Ritter, a young, affable Aurora native who, as a former Catholic missionary, brought with him a wider perspective. In addition, as a former prosecutor, the new DA harbored a keen understanding that the current recycling of the city’s ballooning number of drug users was not working. Ritter agreed to give the special court a shot.
Since then, although Meyer and others have tinkered with the specifics of how a drug-only court would operate, the judge’s notion of the plan’s basics has remained the same. Those who sell large quantities of drugs and appear before the judge will get his full attention and consistent sentences. (Meyer and Ritter both concede that even big-time dealers can be lost in the shuffle of more serious murder, robbery and rape cases.)
But those who use drugs and who plead guilty to possessing small amounts of them will be treated differently than they have been in the past. To begin with, Ritter has agreed to allow deferred sentences for first-time offenders if they plead guilty.
In exchange for the temporary break, the defendants will be sent to some form of treatment immediately, rather than at sentencing. Next, they will be required to jump a number of monitoring hurdles. These include random urinalysis, frequent court appearances and treatment updates–the results of which will be immediately visible on a computer screen sitting on the judge’s desk. “The court,” explains Judge Peterson, “will constantly be in their face.”
Cyrus Callum, a public defender who is helping plan the court, says that unlike the current system, the court will accept screwups. “The program is built on the understanding of the principle that if a person has a drug problem, they’re going to relapse,” he says. “We will understand that, and if they fail, they won’t automatically be thrown out” into jail.
If they complete their treatment and their urine remains clean, the offenders will have their records wiped clean. “People are going to say that we’re mollycoddling drug users under this program,” Meyer predicts. “But the bottom line is, they’re going to get more supervision under this program than in anything else.”
Drug courts are still relatively new; there have been few attempts to assess their success, although some researchers have tried. In August 1993, Florida’s State Justice Institute released a report, “Assessing the Impact of Dade County’s Felony Drug Court,” which optimistically concluded that “drug court defendants showed much lower rates of rearrest.”
That assessment has not been unanimous, however. In 1991 the American Bar Association conducted its own evaluation of several special drug courts that had sprung up in Philadelphia, Milwaukee and Miami. While the ABA found that Miami was reporting low rearrest rates for its treatment diversion program, it also discovered that the court was “creaming”–selecting for treatment only those people unlikely to be rearrested anyway.
The bar association concluded that, when taken as a whole, what went on in Miami’s special court actually did not result in fewer rearrests. “We have no evidence that processing the defendants through drug court is effective in reducing rearrests,” the report said. “If there is an effect of the treatment program on rearrest, it is a modest one at best.”
Locally, as news of the special court begins to make its way around Denver’s law offices, many people say they are optimistic about its success. But some concede that they are not without their concerns.
Lisa Wayne, a public defender and a director of the Colorado Criminal Defense Bar, says she is hopeful that the new court will improve the cycle of arrest-to-probation-to-jail, which she says falls disproportionately on minorities and the poor. But she points out that with more than 1,000 cases expected to wend their way through Meyer’s courtroom each year, suspects will be put under crushing pressure to admit to a crime.
“There will be a great incentive for clients to plea for the short-term benefit of a deferred sentence,” she says. “My concern is the bad [police search-and-seizure] stops you have in Denver. I hope those things aren’t thrown by the wayside because we have a drug court.”
Chief among the concerns, however, are the simple logistical waves that the court will send roiling through the criminal justice system. If Meyer hopes to succeed, for instance, much depends on adequate treatment space for the drug offenders–something that already is sorely lacking in Denver and the rest of Colorado. A June 1992 report by the state’s Alcohol and Drug Abuse Division determined that, depending on the type of treatment, up to 55 percent of those needing counseling could not get it because the facilities didn’t exist.
“There’s still quite a bit of unmet need out there,” says the division’s chief researcher, Bruce Mendelson. “We have 600, 700 people a month on a waiting list right now [for residential treatment facilities]. If people go to a drug court, there damn well better be the treatment centers. That’s got to be part of the package.”
Many of the people coming out of a new drug court are going to be indigent or at least low-income. So it is unlikely that private treatment centers will surface to take up the slack. That means that if there is to be more room, the tab probably will have to be picked up by the government.
Unfortunately, no one planning the new drug court has much of an idea where the money will come from. Meyer says that Denver’s City Council and the Colorado Legislature both have been approached but that he is not encouraged that either will ante up. Harold Meadows, associate director of the Alcohol and Drug Abuse Division, agrees. “The legislature talks a lot about treatment and prevention programs,” he says, “but it tends not to fund them a lot.”
That leaves the financially strapped federal government as the drug court’s remaining sugar daddy. And, while President Clinton’s budget proposal, released two weeks ago, recommends that more federal money go toward drug treatment, the package faces a long and uncertain trip through a tightfisted Congress. Moreover, much of the new money is slated to go to treatment programs inside prisons.
Treatment providers aren’t the only ones who are likely to need more cash to keep up with what is anticipated to be a torrid pace at Meyer’s new court. Meyer says the public defender’s office has indicated that it will need more attorneys. The probation department also will be burdened. Jack Lutes, chief probation officer for the Denver district, says, simply, “We don’t have the personnel.”
Equally worrisome is the larger question of whether treating drug users even works. Although nearly every counseling program worth its salt claims remarkable success for itself, some statistics are troubling. National studies done as recently as the late 1980s show that only about half of those people who finish a treatment program of any kind are drug- or alcohol-free after a year. And up to 20 percent of those who do succeed can be expected to begin using drugs again within five years.
Some local statistics are just as discouraging. For instance, Colorado studies show that nearly 40 percent of those individuals admitted to state-funded treatment centers are there for cocaine problems. But recent numbers indicate that only 16 percent are new cocaine users, suggesting that the same group is revolving in and out of treatment.
“You got 50 people in Denver with a master’s degree in social work and 300 guys with a doctorate in streetology,” explains Bob Cote, director of Step 13, a drug-and-alcohol treatment center for the homeless. “These guys walk out of there with what they want. They’ll shuck-and-jive you.”
The success stories for users who are sent to treatment programs by a judge can be even more elusive. “The ones who come in on their own always get more attention and do well,” says one drug counselor. “The ones who are court-ordered, they just do their 24 or 36 months, whatever it takes to get out of the program.” Adds public defender Callum, “If you don’t want treatment, there’s nobody in the world who can help you.”
Finally, there has been little effort made until recently to figure out which of the smorgasbord of treatment programs is right for a particular user. In fact, a survey by the Colorado Judicial Department last year found that most drug users were misreferred. Concedes Brad Bogue, who researched the report, “The treatment programs used now [by the state] are the ones that have the best salesmen.” Like emerging nations, the more successful drug courts have thrived under the cult of personality. Because the judge must take a more activist role in berating, cajoling and praising those who appear in front of him, he (rarely is it a woman) inevitably takes center stage.
Indeed, Jeffrey Tauber, a California judge who started a well-publicized drug court in Oakland and who has taken the role of lead proselytizer for the idea, compares the special courts to the theater, with the judge being director and center-stage actor. Robert Fogan, the judge who directs a similar court in Florida’s Broward County, runs it like a combination of the TV sitcom Night Court and an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, handing out T-shirts, doughnuts and hugs in equal doses.
Similarly, says defense attorney Kaplan, the success or failure of Denver’s drug court “is very much going to be very dependent on the person who sits higher than everyone else in the courtroom and wears a robe.” That person will be William Meyer, who has committed to direct the court for two years.
A graduate of the University of Denver’s law school, Meyer has been on the bench for ten years and is up for reappointment this year. He worked for six years, from 1975 to 1980, in the Denver district attorney’s office, before leaving for a private practice.
In 1982 he was hired by the Colorado attorney general’s office to work on its special Medicaid fraud control unit, where he prosecuted doctors and nurses for ripping off the government’s insurance system or for physically abusing their patients. Two years later he was named to the bench.
Since then, Meyer has received generally positive reviews from attorneys who have appeared in front of him. They uniformly describe him as an intelligent, hardworking and tough–if dour–juror. (“I’m not the hugging type,” Meyer says. “I don’t think there’s any doubt about that.”)
“At times he can be a little bit distant, and you wondered if he was actually compassionate about what’s going on,” says Kaplan. Adds Truman, “He’s certainly not a bleeding-heart, liberal, social-worker kind of judge. He does not have a reputation as a criminal-defense cupcake.”
“He can be very intimidating,” notes Wayne, of the defense lawyers’ bar. “Most people think he’s this horribly mean judge. But he’s very fair.”
Last week, Meyer, who is 46 years old, was sitting in his expansive chambers on the second floor of the City and County Building. Behind him, to his left, is a framed Seurat poster from the National Gallery of Art in Washington. The only personal photographs in the office are of a dog.
The judge himself is of medium height. He has longish dark hair, swept back and to the side, and a full, well-groomed beard flecked with gray. He has the round face of singer Paul Simon. He doesn’t smile a lot.
“Some years back,” he says, “I had the feeling that, even though I was sentencing people on a regular basis, I didn’t really understand what was happening to them. And all too often, they kept coming back in front of me.
“Probably ten years ago, I was real skeptical whether treatment works. From being a DA and from personal observation, it seemed like we were recycling people. We were seeing the same people over and over and over again. Even now, I’ve been subpoenaed as a judge to testify against people I prosecuted fifteen years ago.”
Frustrated, Meyer says that several years ago he began buttonholing other judges about alternatives to handling drug offenders. He also took a probation training course to better understand what the officers went through. Slowly, he says, he became convinced that drug addicts, if properly placed and supervised, could be helped. “Treatment for treatment’s sake,” he says, “doesn’t work.”
Several years ago, an influential study on the effectiveness of drug treatments came out of Rutgers University. “Basically,” recalls Leslie Smith, a probation analyst for the Colorado Judicial Department, “the title was, `Nothing Works.’ It was sort of like a bombshell in the treatment community.”
Subsequent studies have been been less apocalyptic, Smith says. Yet most have agreed that a lot of the attention being paid to drug users was worthless because there was no effort to hook up users with programs appropriate to their particular addictions.
That concern, and the growing frustration of various agencies in Colorado, prompted the legislature in 1991 to pass a law requiring the state to bring some science to drug treatment. It called for researchers to invent a method to peg what stage of drug use an addict is in and to match him with the right treatment. The judicial department’s Bogue and others have been slogging away on the law since it passed.
They still have some work to do. The new drug evaluation system has been installed in only a handful of districts throughout the state. And researchers are just now beginning to compile a “yellow pages” of available drug treatment programs. Soon, Bogue and others will begin the long overdue chore of attempting to evaluate which of the state’s programs work–and thus which of them Meyer’s new court should use and which the judge should ignore.
Meanwhile, Meyer insists he wants to improve on current drug courts, not merely duplicate them. He claims that he will be able to avoid the “creaming” of the Miami court; that recent studies suggest drug users forced into treatment by the court can get cleaned up; and that he has the judicial fortitude to prevent the Denver venture from becoming an administrative mill that simply processes low-level drug offenders at a faster rate.
Perhaps most important, Meyer says he is trying to keep his expectations reasonable. “One of my conclusions is that a drug court has a realistic possibility of working,” he says. “I’m not saying it’s a be-all or end-all.”
Rick Harwood, an analyst for Lewin-UHI, a Washington, D.C., health policy consulting firm, agrees. “After all,” he points out, “you have to put these things in perspective: What will happen if we don’t treat these people?
