Pubdate: Sat, 09 Dec 2006 Source: Austin American-Statesman (TX) Copyright: 2006 Austin American-Statesman Contact: http://www.statesman.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/32 Author: Steven Kreytak, American-Statesman Staff LONG WAITS FOR DRUG TREATMENT LEAVE OFFENDERS BATTLING WITHOUT TOOLS Overhaul of Travis County Probation Department Is Challenged By Insufficient State Funding, Officials Say. Julie Vasquez-Martinez has been a probation officer in Travis County for 10 years and has witnessed the struggles of felony drug and alcohol offenders trying to turn their lives around. And Martinez has learned that a critical time for many people convicted of common drug crimes comes immediately after they are sentenced to probation. "It's imperative to get them into treatment early," she said. "It's imperative so they don't continue to make the wrong decisions. They need these tools and techniques to stay clean and sober." But department statistics show that hundreds of newly sentenced probationers in Travis County are waiting to get into court-ordered substance abuse treatment. Judges send some offenders to county jails to wait for a treatment slot to open up, exacerbating the county's ongoing jail crowding problem. Others are released into the community to fight their addiction on their own. The wait for treatment is usually several months, department officials said. The waiting lists in Travis County are among the longest in the state and could hinder the probation department's ambitious overhaul of its practices. The goal of the two-year effort is to eliminate guesswork and let research and analysis determine the best ways of keeping probationers from re-offending and ending up behind bars. Geraldine Nagy, director of Travis County adult probation - officially called the Community Supervision and Corrections Department - said recent numbers show that 499 people were waiting for outpatient drug and alcohol services, up from 373 2 1/2 years ago. Most of them are not in jail. That's the longest waiting list for outpatient treatment of any Texas county, according to state statistics. (Statistics for Harris County, Texas' largest, were unavailable.) Meanwhile, Nagy said, Travis County has 118 probationers waiting to get into residential substance abuse facilities, including the county-run, 76-bed SMART program near the jail in Del Valle. About half of them are waiting in the Travis County Jail, which on Friday was more than 400 inmates over its designed capacity. Crowded jails led Travis County voters last year to approve spending $23.5 million for jail expansion; construction should begin next year. The Texas Department of Criminal Justice funds the county probation department, and this year, the county received $2.1 million for substance abuse treatment for probationers, up from $1.9 million last year. But without a significant boost in state money, the waiting lists are likely to increase in Travis County as the probation department puts more emphasis on treatment, Nagy said. With Texas prisons full and some key state lawmakers hesitant to spend millions of dollars to build new ones, the Legislature is expected to look at bolstering probation programs when it reconvenes next month. Nagy hopes lawmakers will increase funding for drug and alcohol treatment programs. In the meantime, probationers such as a 19-year-old man whom Martinez currently supervises will have a harder time turning their lives around. The man, whom Martinez would not identify, citing privacy laws, was sentenced in June to probation for a felony cocaine possession conviction. He has been waiting since then to get into intensive outpatient drug treatment and was arrested again recently on a subsequent drug charge. Those charges were dismissed, and Martinez hopes the man can stay away from the bad influences in his life long enough to learn the tools to stop using. "It's a battle against time," she said. State District Judge Jon Wisser, who has presided over a felony court in Travis County since the 1980s, said that waits to get into substance abuse treatment are not new. He said treatment funding has long been an easy target for politicians looking to trim budgets. Some defense lawyers say the long waits are an injustice and a waste of taxpayer money. And they question the practice of sending probationers to jail to wait for treatment. "In that situation, a sentence that is supposed to be therapeutic ends up being punitive," Austin defense lawyer Jon Evans said. Shane Brooks, another defense lawyer, said that clients who are pondering a plea bargain often will choose incarceration over probation, calculating that the time they spend waiting for treatment in jail, combined with the length of treatment, is longer than what they would serve by going straight to jail. "It's disheartening," Martinez said. "You know these clients. You care about them. You want them to do better . . . "Especially when they are young like this and they don't have the best role models." - --- MAP posted-by: Elaine