to take the “sure thing,” basically defendants who were high need, but low risk, so they had very high rates of graduation and recidivism.
The newer approach is based on allocating the resources according to where they can have the greatest impact. If someone is high risk, low need, then when the day is done he or she is much less likely to be in the community committing more crimes. In contrast, if we don’t intervene more intensively with high-risk, high-need defendants, chances are they will commit more and more serious crimes. The reality is that most crime is committed by a small minority of the population. The priority is to address recidivism by working with the individuals who are greater potential risks to the community.
The assessment of defendants as high risk is now fundamental for admission to Drug Court programs, including the Youth Offender (YO), Habitual Offender (HOPE), and Women in Need (WIN) Courts here in the city of Las Vegas. The WIN Court is a specialty Drug Court for high-risk women, most of whom are involved in prostitution to support their addiction. We also have a specialty Drug Court for habitual offenders—individuals who have multiple arrests and have spent considerable time in the system.
In YO Court the defendants are by definition high risk, high need due to their age and developmental stage, adolescence and young adulthood. Recent research shows that the brain’s prefrontal cortex, the seat of decision-making and judgment, isn’t fully developed until after age twenty-four, so our defendants are constitutionally unable to connect their decisions with the potential consequences of those decisions. They can’t weigh their actions against the consequences. All they want to do is have fun and then worry about what the consequences will be later.
How Is the Youth Offender (YO) Court Different from Other Drug Courts?
The court I preside over is the Youth Offender (YO) Court, which is part of the Las Vegas Municipal Court. Municipal Court handles misdemeanors within the cities of Las Vegas, Henderson, and North Las Vegas. District Court handles civil cases, gross misdemeanors, and felonies. When you are in the District Court Drug Court, you go to prison if you fail to comply with court requirements. When you are in the Municipal Court and you fail to comply, the biggest hammer I have is six months in city jail.
Launched in July of 2010, YO Court is a specialty Drug Court for defendants between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four. YO Court was follows an intensive supervision Drug Court model with a focus on treatment and family participation to address the root cause of addiction, and holds young offenders with substance abuse issues and their parent figures accountable, rather than just punishing them.
Young offenders are difficult as a group, but another area in which they are different from other groups of defendants is that they usually have somebody helping them, and it’s normally their parent(s). When I was growing up, at age eighteen you were out of the house. “You’re done. See you later. Good luck. Get rich, and send some money.” But it’s different today. The idea for YO Court came about when I started to tire of sitting in court with kids—young men and women, but really kids—who are twenty-one and twenty-two, and having their parents continuously arguing in favor of them and their actions, trying to defend them, no matter how clear it was that their children were in the wrong. What I witnessed time and again were parents making excuses for their kids’ behavior, finding fault in everything and everyone but their kids.
I described this scenario to a friend who worked in addiction treatment, and he told me, “You know, you are not going to do any good with any of those kids unless you can get to their parents. You’ve got to intervene with their families.” He continued, “You can focus on those kids, but if you don’t get to their families, they are just going right back to the toxic ground that they came from, where they can do no wrong, and where their bad behavior is enabled and supported. And soon they are going to be back in your court or someone else’s.” I recently attended a conference where the presenter cited a study that showed 95 percent of the young people in this age group are likely to relapse after treatment. He followed it up by saying, “However, when a kid goes through treatment and the family members do not, he or she is eleven times more likely to continue using after the relapse.”
What this means is that all of these kids go to treatment and complete it, and then they think, Hey, I’ve made it. I’m good. So they go out and test it, and relapse at extremely high rates. When the family members get sucked back into that kid’s addiction and continue to enable the drug use, then he or she has very little motivation to quit. However, if the family has had the right education and takes the right steps, including setting and enforcing limits vis-à-vis their kid’s drug use, then he or she ultimately realizes, “Wait a minute. I really am out of my element. I truly do have two choices: one is to get clean and demonstrate to my family that I’m changing, and the other is to lose my family because they are not going to sit there and watch me while I continue on the same path.”
We chose to focus on eighteen to twenty-four year-olds for a couple of reasons. One is they are our future, and these are the kids we really need to focus on. I recently received a report from the coroners’ office here in Clark County stating that every week, on average, someone under the age of thirty dies as the result of addiction. One person a week. And that’s only one county. When you put the numbers together across the nation we are talking about an incredible amount of young people whose lives are being wasted at a tremendous cost to society.
There isn’t a single young person in YO Court who doesn’t know at least three people who have died from addiction. When I first started doing this a couple of years ago, I placed a young man in a clean and sober living house, and thought I would go visit. When I went to visit him, I became concerned that this kid could be in real mental health trouble because he had all these funeral announcements on his refrigerator. I thought, This kid is really sick. There is something wrong because he’s got all these morbid announcements. I asked him, “What is this about?” And he said, “Oh, those are all my friends who have died this year.” All of those deaths were related to drug use. Rapidly I went from scared to feeling bad.
So we get these kids in YO Court, and I believe they are the ones our community needs. Our community, and I think other communities, need YO Court. But to be successful, I need to engage the families of our defendants in the criminal justice process, and the addiction treatment and recovery process. The parents of addicts go through various stages: denial of the problem, covering up the problem, lying to others about the problem, and over-functioning to compensate for the under-functioning and irresponsibility of the addict—all of which enables the addict to continue his or her addictive behavior.
YO Court has licensed counselors who conduct full substance use and psychosocial assessments to determine whether or not defendants qualify to participate in our program. They don’t qualify just because they admit they have a problem—they have to suffer from the disease of addiction. It’s essential to make sure that defendants are accurately assessed and placed in the proper form and level of treatment. In this way, criminal justice works hand-in-hand with counseling.
We have a multidisciplinary team that includes a prosecutor, a defense attorney, case managers, counselors, and the judge, of course. Obviously the judge has the final say, but I draw on the team’s opinions and recommendations to come up with the most effective positive or negative sanctions. The judge gets to claim the glory when defendants are successful and graduate, but the truth is the judge rarely makes the call all by him- or herself.
If everyone on the team is going to think and feel the same way I do, then, as the judge, I don’t need them. I can always make the decision. It’s important to have a variety of perspectives. I believe you need to have people from different disciplines who can give you different points of view. Let’s say the assessment comes in, we meet as a team, and we agree, “Okay, that’s our game plan.” And when the defendant strays from the game plan, as a team we meet to decide the best way to handle that deviation. In Drug Courts, it is especially important that
