Pubdate: Wed, 25 Jun 2003
Source: City Pages (MN)
Copyright: 2003, City Pages Media, Inc.
Contact:  http://www.citypages.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/2567
Author: Beth Hawkins

DRUG COURT: THE GOOD NEWS AND THE BAD NEWS

Hennepin County's drug court has cleared court dockets and steered a lot of 
people toward treatment.

It's also allowed the county to push thousands more casual offenders into 
the corrections system.

The weekend of May 11 was warm and mild, making the following Monday more 
hectic than usual in Judge William Howard's courtroom. As the afternoon 
session opens, the judge has nearly four dozen cases to dispose of, and 
theoretically just three hours in which to do it.

A bailiff opens the glassed-in booth where people brought up from the jail 
wait and lets out an Ethiopian man who, it quickly becomes apparent, only 
speaks Oromo. There's no translator in the building, so the guy's brother, 
who came to get him, is pressed into service. "You are charged with 
possession of khat," the judge says, slowly. "The police searched your 
house and they found it. This is the beginning of the process to find out 
whether you have violated the law. The police say you have." Howard asks 
the man's brother to tell him that he may be sent to a class where he will 
learn that "khat is not okay for the United States," and gives him a date 
to come back. Six friends trail him out of the courtroom.

The next man out of the holding area is charged with possessing .8 grams of 
coke. He's dressed in a filthy T-shirt and rotting sweat pants, but has the 
whitest tennis shoes imaginable. He's sent upstairs to undergo a chemical 
dependency assessment administered by county public-health workers.

Then there's a man arrested for possessing 1.4 grams of coke. He has 
another unresolved drug case, and therefore an attorney, but no one can 
figure out when his lawyer will be here. The defense attorneys keep a group 
calendar on their table, but someone spilled coffee on it. Howard orders 
bail, which the defendant can't pay. He storms back into the holding area 
and starts shouting and smashing things. After unloading their guns, three 
bailiffs follow him.

A man shoots out of the in-custody booth and walks past the crowd and 
toward the double doors at the front of the courtroom like some kind of 
quick-stepping zombie. A bailiff tries to direct him back toward the 
podium, but he turns instead toward the jury room on the other side of the 
court. His hair is fashioned into four rows of little spikes, which gives 
all of his bobbing and weaving a comical air and people are cracking up. At 
the podium he can't get his hand to connect with the mic.

Eventually the sight of Howard brings him back to Earth. "How you doin'?" 
he asks the judge.

The probation officer holding the man's file notes that his mother has 
called and won't let him come home; his parents called the police because 
he was threatening his father with a stun gun. When the officers found him 
he was carrying 3.2 grams of crack. Howard asks for evaluations of his 
mental health and medication regime--"I think we just witnessed some 
behavior"--and sets bail at $3,000.

Welcome to the vanguard of Minnesota jurisprudence, Hennepin County 
District Court's much-touted drug court: two courtrooms, three judges, and 
a small roster of lawyers and probation officers who do nothing but deal 
with drug offenders. They handle more than a fourth of all felonies filed 
in Hennepin County. To their proponents, the harried people who work in 
this room are on the cutting edge of something called therapeutic 
jurisprudence. To detractors, they are helping increase the number of 
people caught up in an ill-conceived war on drugs.

Drug court judges are supposed to rule their courtrooms with iron fists in 
velvet gloves. Offenders check in often and undergo frequent urinalysis. 
Missteps bring swift consequences, including lectures, "flash" 
incarceration, and longer and longer jail stays. "Graduates" get a round of 
applause.

Drug court's chief judge, Howard bears a striking resemblance to the late 
Dave Thomas. He rockets from empathy to irritation. One or the other of his 
arms is usually flung over a shoulder or his head, and the momentum from 
their swinging seems to propel him around his raised seating area. 
Sometimes he's flung back in his chair, sometimes he looms far over the 
bench, as if looking for something he dropped on the floor.

Probably half the people appearing before him this afternoon were arrested 
on bench warrants, meaning they missed a court appearance or otherwise 
failed to comply with their sentences. An impressive number swear they 
missed because of a funeral. A cousin in Indiana, a brother here in town, a 
roommate, a mother-in-law: At one point, Howard quips to one of the public 
defenders that she must be putting hexes on her clients.

One woman didn't show because she was in a battered women's program and was 
scared that her boyfriend would pop up at her court appearance. After 
Howard grants her bail, she makes a beeline for a guy in the audience. They 
leave holding hands.

As the afternoon goes on, the pace becomes frenetic. Howard quickly hears 
two more cases involving repeat offenders, and then that of a crack dealer 
arrested on a bench warrant after skipping out of treatment. He's been to 
treatment 28 times in the last 14 years, probation reports; their latest 
recommendation is that he find a self-help group instead. The man's lawyer 
protests that the treatment program the man just walked away from is 
willing to take him back.

Howard seems angry now. He can't believe the program's administrators knew 
the county wouldn't pay when they said they'd take the man back. The judge 
stands up. "I need a minute," he mutters, disappearing into the hall.

When he gets back, he finds himself facing a tiny woman with a hard face. 
She was picked up over the weekend on prostitution charges, she has seven 
kids, and she wants to go home. Right away she begins pleading in a 
little-girl voice. The probation officer opens her file: Since her drug 
court case started in 2001, she's picked up 10 misdemeanors, ranging from 
trespassing to prostitution. A local motel keeps complaining about her to 
the Hennepin County Attorney's Office. None of which suggests that she's 
straightening out, Howard says.

She starts to cry, but he doesn't budge. He wants her in jail during the 
few days it'll take probation to come up with a new plan. She stalks out, 
snarling.

"Ho-ass motherfucker."

Hundreds of drug courts have sprung up around the country in the last 10 
years, a byproduct of the nation's war on drugs. The idea is to stop users 
from cycling repeatedly through the system by reaching them in the hours 
after their arrest--a so-called teachable moment when people are thought to 
be especially open to chemical-dependency treatment. The hoped-for result: 
unclogged dockets and fewer tax dollars spent on prisons.

In the seven years since its inception, Hennepin County's drug court has 
indeed increased the pace at which narcotics cases are processed. Whereas 
drug cases used to drag on for months, most are now resolved within a few 
weeks.

But instead of making less work for the courts, the increased efficiency 
has made it possible for prosecutors to charge 50 percent more people, most 
of them minorities from a handful of Minneapolis neighborhoods caught with 
small amounts of a variety of drugs. And while most of the defendants who 
pass through this court are offered treatment and other help to get clean, 
the reality is that many will go back to using drugs. And when they do, 
that's hundreds more people who have criminal records in an era when being 
convicted of a drug felony carries sanctions not even attached to murder.

Between 1980 and 2000 there was a 1,000 percent increase in the number of 
drug offenders in state prisons, from 19,000 to 220,000. In 1980, some 
52,000 people, or just 8 percent of the nation's inmates, were incarcerated 
for drug law violations. Today, one-fourth of the more than 2 million 
people behind bars are there for drug offenses.

Mandatory sentencing laws passed in the late '80s and early '90s have meant 
drastically longer prison terms for even casual users. The average drug 
offender released from a federal prison in 1992 was there for 33 months; 
the average offender convicted that year could expect to spend 70 months 
incarcerated. In 1995, it cost taxpayers some $9 billion to keep all of 
these people locked up.

Contrary to its liberal reputation, Minnesota has not been an exception. 
 From 1986 to 1996, the year before drug court began, the number of state 
prison inmates with a drug offense as their highest charge went from 2 
percent, or 34, to 10 percent, or 505. From 1993 to 1996, about 1,200 
felony drug cases were filed in Hennepin County each year. The numbers 
threatened to bring the criminal justice system to a halt and drain public 
coffers.

In an attempt to resolve the impasse between politicians' tough-on-crime 
stances and the realities of trying to deal with the resulting flood of 
convicts, other cities had started drug courts. Hennepin County was already 
trying to divert some drug offenders into treatment when Chief Judge Kevin 
Burke crusaded to start a drug court here. The purpose, he told the 
Minneapolis City Council, was to make the system "work radically faster," 
the Star Tribune reported.

At the time, the first drug court had been in operation in Miami for five 
years and dozens more had sprung up in other states. Burke and the task 
force that helped set up the local drug court were aware of their 
shortcomings, and aimed high. As Hennepin County prepared to process its 
first defendants, doubts were waved aside. We were going to have "one of 
the good ones," organizers promised.

Whereas most drug courts won't take cases involving dealers, weapons, or in 
some cases even repeat offenders, Hennepin County decided to take every 
narcotics case except those in which the defendant was charged with a 
violent act. Further, recognizing that drug abuse doesn't crop up in a 
vacuum, the court arranged for an array of services for participants. In 
addition to treatment, defendants get help with mental health issues, 
housing, education, and parenting skills.

Possibly the most important distinction between Hennepin County's court and 
the others is transparent to most non-lawyers, however. To participate in 
most drug courts, defendants must agree to plead guilty and to surrender 
many, or in some cases all, of their rights. Not so here: Defendants can 
undergo screening and begin treatment, if it's appropriate, while retaining 
their right to challenge their police stop or even to go to trial. (Rights 
notwithstanding, less than half a percent of drug court clients end up at 
trial. More than 95 percent end up pleading guilty; the rest have their 
cases dismissed.)

 From the start, the court got great press. A Star Tribune story written 
during its first few days of operation profiled a man who had gone to great 
pains to get himself arrested so that he could avail himself of the court's 
referral to county-financed treatment. Not counting the expense of 
treatment (which is paid for out of an already existing federal fund), the 
court's budget was $1 million, more than half of it from county coffers. 
Costs, supporters promised, would go down as fewer drug users re-offended.

Even as the court was being celebrated, though, the number of drug-related 
felonies filed in Hennepin County was skyrocketing. In 1996, about 1,200 
such cases were filed. In 1997, the number shot up 50 percent to 1,788; 
it's hovered between 1,600 and 1,850 ever since then. About 75 percent of 
defendants are African American; most are arrested in Minneapolis's poorer 
neighborhoods.

An increase in zero-tolerance policing strategies such as Minneapolis's 
CODEFOR is partially responsible for the increase in prosecutions. But at 
least as big a factor, critics say, is drug court's efficiency. Under the 
old system, narcotics cases weren't a priority. It used to take six to nine 
months to resolve a drug case. But the advent of drug court has created 
teams of attorneys, police, and other court workers who are better at 
making narcotics cases stick, according to the people who work there. As a 
result, today, four weeks is typical of the length of time it takes to 
resolve a case.

"Prosecutors and police have had a learning curve," explains Judge Howard. 
"The prosecutors tell police, 'Okay, you have to do this next time if you 
want me to charge your cases.' It isn't that there are so many more cases. 
It's that they've learned how to do them better." Defense attorneys agree, 
noting that they're seeing fewer bad police stops.

While the increase in numbers of arrests hasn't been as dramatic as the 
increase in prosecutions, police are arresting more users. State and 
federal records show that the arrest rates in Minneapolis and Hennepin 
County went up 17 and 10 percent, respectively, in 1997.

But according to drug court statistics, those arrests aren't scooping up 
dealers, either. Some 60 percent of drug court cases are fifth-degree 
felonies--the kind of low-level possession cases that police and 
prosecutors used to be quicker to let go of.

"In 1996, if you got stopped and patted down and had a rock, my guess is 
the police officer might arrest you and charge you with fifth-degree 
possession," says Leonardo Castro, chief public defender for Hennepin 
County. "Or because they know you're an addict, know this is your problem, 
do they take your rock away? Stomp it on the ground? Or does the county 
attorney decide not to charge you? In 1997, did we have more people on the 
streets? My guess is not.

"Part of the idea is, now we can get people treatment, so we're charging 
more people because we think we can help," he continues. "But if the 
numbers are staying constant, then something's not working."

 From where Castro sits, the biggest problem comes when someone "flunks" 
drug court. "What about the guy who comes in, goes through treatment, then 
three months later tests positive? He gets another chance, flunks, repeats, 
and then finally the judge says, 'Sorry, I'm going to have to send you to 
prison.' So now he has a felony record."

And once someone has a drug felony on his record, rehabilitation becomes a 
nightmare. Aside from the usual barriers encountered by convicts--trouble 
getting jobs and apartments, for instance--drug offenders face a special 
set of ongoing sanctions. They cannot live in or visit someone in public 
housing. They are not eligible for federal educational aid, for food 
stamps, or any of the last vestiges of welfare.

"Employers don't distinguish between people who went to prison and people 
who have an addiction," notes Howard. "Rapists getting out of Stillwater 
can get a Pell Grant, while a kid on diversion can't get any education 
money unless it's from the school itself. That's where the system really 
needs to look."

And these days, it doesn't take a very large stash of drugs to end up 
charged with a felony: 42.5 grams of marijuana is a fifth-degree felony in 
Minnesota, as is possession of any amount of cocaine or crack, or of other 
illicit narcotics. In 1991, 500 fifth-degree cases were filed in Hennepin 
County; today there are almost twice as many.

"The level of criminalization is a decision made by the state Legislature 
and Congress. Why felonize those cases?" asks Howard. "Those are 
essentially political questions about things that I cannot change. All I 
can do is try to ameliorate what's in front of me. The reality is that 
although we have a bottleneck, we are going to be far worse off if we don't 
deal with them."

Even so, he says, he still finds drug court "the most hopeful place in the 
building." "Treatment does work. Does it work all the time? No, but that's 
the way society is," says Howard. "We can't afford to put as many people in 
prison and on the ash heap as we are."

Juvenile court Judge Tanja Manrique is filling in for Howard, who is at a 
conference. Drug Court II, as it's known informally, is a much smaller 
courtroom, and it's library-quiet. All eyes are on Manrique, who is 
conducting "review"--talking with participants who are under court order to 
check in on a regular basis. It helps that she's a stone fox with a soft, 
feminine voice. When she speaks, everyone strains to hear.

Right now, she's talking to a man whose last scheduled urinalysis turned up 
diluted. She sends him upstairs for an "instant." Then she turns her 
attention to a heroin addict who is supposed to report to the workhouse for 
a 60-day stay. He's had a tough couple of weeks and relapsed. He doesn't 
want to go back in the workhouse on methadone, so he's asking the judge to 
send him to detox for a few days first.

Halfway through trying to explain all of this, the man's shoulders crumple. 
He looks up at Manrique and says simply, "I need help." Court workers pick 
up his story where he stumbled, filling in the details.

People on methadone pose an enormous challenge to drug court. 
Theoretically, they can leave the workhouse daily to get their dose from 
one of several Twin Cities methadone clinics, but in practice this doesn't 
work so well. Inmates can't leave the workhouse on weekends, and if the 
slightest thing goes wrong--if they're late getting out or if a guard who's 
never heard of drug court decides their paperwork has an undotted i--they 
can lose their slot at the methadone clinic, sometimes permanently. The 
judge has to anticipate every potential catch-22.

It's a minor hassle, five minutes of Manrique's day. But it's an 
instructive look at a moment in what's been dubbed "therapeutic 
jurisprudence," where a judge gets personally involved with a defendant's 
rehabilitation. "Participants in the drug court movement believe that 
success is due in large part to direct judicial involvement with offenders, 
provided on a regular basis," writes Richard Gebelein, the judge who 
founded Delaware's drug court, in a policy paper published by the National 
Institute of Justice. "It is likely that judges who have been successful 
with the approach will want to apply it to other areas."

Judges wield a lot of power, but typically do so in narrowly defined ways. 
They set the parameters for the arguments advanced during trials. They 
listen to the interpretations of the law advanced by attorneys and decide 
who's right. They sentence the guilty. But they can only judge the cases 
prosecutors present them, and more and more, recently, they can only apply 
punishments established by politicians.

"Some of us, in our hearts, like to do social work, too," admits Howard, a 
fervent believer in treatment's possibilities. "Most of these folks are 
retrievable."

In most drug courts, judges and attorneys are supposed to work as members 
of a team. This presents ethical dilemmas for most participants. Judges are 
expected to balance their personal involvement with defendants with 
impartiality. Prosecutors are supposed to safeguard public safety, not seek 
to give offenders every chance at rehabilitation.

Defense attorneys arguably face the most serious ethical quandaries, 
however. In many courts they are expected to convince their clients to 
waive their rights and plead guilty in exchange for a chance at treatment. 
Hennepin County doesn't do this, which makes local defenders more 
comfortable. But the collaborative approach is still often dicey, in the 
opinion of chief Public Defender Castro. "We advocate for people, and 
sometimes what they want is not in their best interests," he explains. 
"We're not set up to be problem-solvers, we're set up to be advocates 
fighting within rules."

Moreover, the further the U.S. justice system moves from the goal of 
rehabilitation, the more dangerous the collaborative approach becomes, he 
argues. The judges who've presided over the local drug court so far have 
done so with dignity and, for the most part, respect for all participants. 
But what happens when there's no Judge Howard, with his secret yen to do 
social work? "You've got a problem," Castro says, "every time a court is 
personality-based."

As an example, Castro recalls the situation a couple of years ago in Drug 
Court II. When Castro took over as public defender in 2001, offenders would 
appear in review court alone, without an attorney. That might be all right 
if they were simply reporting that treatment was proceeding apace, he says, 
but what about people who were flunking? Who were being sent to jail, or 
having their sentences changed?

Castro was appalled. But with offenders sometimes making weekly 
appearances, his office doesn't have the resources to make sure attorneys 
are by their sides. Eventually, he assigned several dispositional 
advisers--the public defender's answer to a social worker or probation 
officer--to take turns sitting in the court to advocate when something went 
wrong or to run next door to Drug Court I to alert a public defender.

The rights of the accused aren't a popular topic these days, though, and 
concerns such as Castro's haven't gotten nearly as much press as drug 
court's efficiency in clearing clogged dockets. As a result, in the 12 
years since the first drug court opened, government agencies throughout the 
country have experimented with applying the "problem-solving court" model 
to other social issues.

Each of the courts has a slightly different purpose: Domestic violence 
courts are supposed to give victims a greater role; mental health calendars 
are supposed to steer people with mental illnesses toward the services they 
need to avoid repeatedly running afoul of the system; community courts are 
supposed to make neighborhoods aware that law enforcement and prosecutors 
are dealing with livability crimes. The U.S. Department of Justice has even 
proposed the creation of re-entry courts, where parolees would receive more 
intensive supervision.

The seemingly limitless expansion of the "problem-solving court," critics 
warn, will continue to "widen the net of social control." Their fears are 
based on the time-tested legal theory that new sanctions beget bigger 
systems, which in turn hand out even more sanctions. The classic example of 
this is juvenile court. A hundred years ago, truancy and other minor 
offenses committed by young people were usually worked out by parents, 
teachers, and, in the worst cases, the neighborhood beat cop. Then came 
juvenile courts, which were supposed to function as guidance agencies. 
Partly because the new courts were seen as benevolent, more and more kids 
have been funneled into them ever since.

Hennepin County Assistant Public Defender Dave Murrin was a member of the 
task force that created drug court. Even back then, he predicted that the 
court would create more and more drug cases. "My general feeling was that 
if you created a court, you're going to have more people using it," he 
recalls. "It generates its own business simply by being available."

It's not hard to drum up that business, either. When he was assigned to 
drug court, Howard spent an evening with police patrolling Minneapolis's 
"open-air drug markets." "We picked up three people at the exact same spot 
within 45 minutes," he recalls. "You have to understand how easy it is for 
police to bring these people in."

Which explains why too many poor minorities cycle through the court, he 
says. "The people who are the most blatant in their drug sales are the ones 
who go down first," explains Howard. "It's harder to infiltrate a bar in 
the suburbs than to go bust dealers on the corner, who you can see. Police 
work is sometimes based on opportunity."

 From there, it's not much of a stretch to see the war on drugs as the 
ultimate exercise in net widening. "After all, imprisonment is a potent 
form of social control, one that, in this country, continues far beyond 
prison walls, or even the probation officer's building," writes civil 
liberties attorney Elaine Cassel. "Chances are you already--or soon 
will--know someone who cannot get a job, rent a house, drive a car, or vote 
because he or she had a criminal conviction once in their lifetime.

"In 2003, more than 615,000 prisoners will attempt to re-enter society, and 
some of the strongest obstacles to their doing so will have been erected by 
their own government," she notes in an essay for the CounterPunch 
newsletter. "Released inmates who want to make a life for themselves will 
be systematically denied the opportunity to do so. As a result, recidivism, 
which keeps the prison economy flourishing and exponentially adds to the 
numbers of underclass citizens, will be assured."

When drug court opened for business, one number dropped right away--the 
number of serious, first- and second-degree felonies filed in Hennepin 
County courts. Concerned that drug court would not deal harshly enough with 
large-scale dealers, then-County Attorney Mike Freeman began channeling the 
biggest cases to local federal courts.

"The fed system is a good route for the people whose motivation is greed," 
said Freeman, who diverted five or six cases a month. "We in the state have 
never figured out a treatment program for recovering drug entrepreneurs." 
The number of cases filed in U.S. District Court in Minnesota jumped 
accordingly.

Freeman's wasn't an isolated fear. During drug court's first two years, 
what little criticism there was focused on the perception that it was too 
soft on offenders. In response, Kevin Burke, then the court's lone judge, 
released statistics showing that he had sent more drug offenders to prison 
than traditional courts, and that more than half of participants completed 
treatment. Still, Burke faced criticism from prosecutors and from the 
county commissioners who had voted to fund the court for imposing prison 
sentences for less time than state guidelines called for.

Evaluating the court's success hasn't gotten any easier in the intervening 
years, not least because everyone seems to have a different definition of 
success. Gail Baez, the assistant county attorney in charge of drug court 
prosecutors, says too many community members still complain about the 
effects drug-related crimes have on their neighborhoods. Dennis Miller, the 
head probation officer, is pleased with even the small changes he sees in 
the lives of individual offenders.

And what about a former crack user who now only smokes marijuana, asks Todd 
Barnette, the attorney who heads the team of public defenders assigned to 
the court. Or someone who was clean for three years and then relapsed? Can 
we decree them successes?

And the courts' backers expect early enthusiasm to wane as the model is 
expanded. "As the results of more sophisticated evaluations become 
available, preliminary success rates will not be sustained," Richard 
Gebelein, the judge who founded Delaware's drug courts, wrote in a recent 
policy paper for the U.S. Department of Justice's National Institute of 
Justice. "As less tractable groups participate, rates of compliance and 
graduation will decline and recidivism will rise. Support may fade and 
success appears to diminish. The movement cannot afford to claim too much 
and so must define success realistically."

Even as the number of participants grows, Gebelein adds, most local 
governments will expect drug courts to get by using the same resources: 
"The usual result is deterioration of treatment quality as programs are 
shortened and more people are crowded into each group. This can only 
decrease effectiveness."

Further, he notes, the health care system could chip away at the courts' 
success. "The premise of managed care, increasingly the norm, is that the 
least treatment required should be provided," he writes. "This is at odds 
with research on substance abuse treatment, which has shown that the longer 
a person remains in treatment, the more successful treatment will be. 
Furthermore, managed care assumes the patient will aggressively pursue the 
treatment he or she deems necessary. Because drug court clients initially 
prefer not to be treated, they are likely to welcome a ruling by the health 
care provider or the managed care insurer that treatment is needed."

(This raises an interesting aside: Very few Hennepin County drug court 
participants have health insurance--probably as a result of the 
differential policing that's responsible for the bulk of the narcotics 
caseload. Those who do have health care are sent to their insurance 
companies for chemical dependency assessments. If treatment is indicated, 
defendants must then hope their insurer agrees to pay for it.)

One person who's willing to declare the courts a categorical failure is 
Bill McColl, director of national affairs for the Drug Policy Alliance. 
"Drug courts have not slowed expansion into prisons," he asserts. "And as 
they have expanded, they have pulled in a large number of people who were 
not otherwise caught up in the criminal justice system."

McColl is not mollified that those additional felons have better access to 
treatment. "It's not just half a loaf, it's a loaf that's diverting 
attention and resources from community programs," he argues. "Yeah, it 
kinda works, sort of. But not as well as [other] options.

"Where we choose to pigeonhole this makes a difference," he says, opining 
that the public health system is the place where we should be dealing with 
addiction. "The criminal justice system had become a revolving door for 
many of these people. But with the drug courts we're building an ever more 
baroque system for dealing with these types of health problems."

In recent years, several Western European nations have decriminalized 
marijuana, and in coming weeks Britain will reduce penalties as well. Last 
month, Canada's ruling Liberal Party proposed decriminalizing the 
possession of up to 15 grams of marijuana. Suggesting that pot smoking is 
largely a public health issue, party officials suggested that possession of 
small amounts of marijuana should be punished with a ticket.

In response, however, Bush Administration anti-drug officials described 
Canada as "a dangerous staging area for some of the most dangerous 
marijuana," according to a New York Times article by Eric Schlosser, author 
of Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market.

"Meanwhile, the United States has escalated its war on pot," Schlosser 
writes. "The number of marijuana arrests now approaches three-quarters of a 
million annually, largely for simple possession. More people are in prison 
for marijuana crimes today than ever before. Dozens, if not hundreds, are 
serving life sentences for nonviolent pot offenses. Attorney General John 
Ashcroft has called for full enforcement of the pot laws and spearheaded a 
crackdown on medicinal marijuana providers in California, though their 
efforts are legal under state law."

Judge John Sommerville's afternoon in drug court had been about as long as 
they get. He'd dealt with several dozen garden-variety appearances: new 
cases, people who skipped court dates and had to be rearrested, defendants 
who somehow hadn't managed the trip from the courthouse to their treatment 
provider.

He'd also seen another schizophrenic threatening his family, and tried to 
field questions about a defendant who didn't show because she was in the 
hospital following a jailhouse suicide attempt. Jail officials were said to 
be trying to figure out how to release her in absentia so that they 
wouldn't have to pay her medical bills. By 4:30 p.m. a scowl appeared 
permanently etched onto Sommerville's face.

His clerk surveyed the half-dozen people still seated in the audience. 
"Anybody else here who is waiting to be called?"

A chubby young black man stands. He's completed all but one of the terms of 
his sentence. If he's allowed to pay a small fine today, his case will go 
on administrative probation. That means that if he stays out of trouble for 
a couple of years he'll be free and can have his record wiped clean.

The judge briefly considers having the man come back in the morning, but 
changes his mind. This is, after all, the moment drug court is supposed to 
be all about. The clerks, attorneys, and probation officers sit silently 
while the man runs down the hall. He comes back about 10 minutes later, 
clutching a receipt.

Sommerville stands, and his robe slips off one shoulder, revealing a pink 
shirt. He applauds, and everyone else follows his lead. "You should be 
proud of yourself," he says to the young man before turning to climb down 
off the bench. The court reporter picks up her equipment and follows the 
bailiffs and attorneys back into the chambers.

Outside, the halls are deserted. The man looks around uncertainly, still 
clutching the receipt. After a couple of minutes, he shuffles off toward 
the elevator.
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