Penny Wise, Pound Foolish

Joshua Wallace spent his days shooting drugs on downtown streets
when police arrested him in 2005. Held in King County Jail for
possessing a half-gram of methamphetamine, the homeless Wallace faced a
maximum term of five years in prison. But three years later, at the age
of 34, Wallace is out of jail, lives in his own apartment, and attends
community college. He’s clean. And he credits his recovery to King
County’s drug-diversion court.

The program, which started in 1994,
allows nonviolent drug
offenders to opt
for rehabilitation services instead of going to
jail.
If defendants don’t comply, they have to serve their jail
sentences. Hundreds of people have graduated from drug court, saving
millions of dollars in incarceration costs and the costs associated
with recidivism; and it has given people like Wallace a way to stop the
cycle of addiction and arrest.

“Following court rules helped me do things like go to NA meetings,
get into housing, and get into outpatient rehabilitation with the
option of going into inpatient if I needed it,” Wallace says. “Those
are things I would have never done on my own.” He adds: “I think if I
took the felony [conviction], I wouldn’t have had a reason to quit
using.”

But despite the program’s success, the cost-saving court may be cut.
Earlier this month, King County Executive Ron Sims announced a $68
million shortfall in the county’s 2009 budget. In addition to proposing
a slew of cuts to health and human services, Sims asked criminal
justice agencies to slash 8.6 percent of their budgets. A memo
circulated by county law-enforcement agencies says that in order to
reduce its budget by $3.8 million, King County Superior Court “will
have to decrease or eliminate discretionary services.” At the top of
the list: “adult drug court.”

“We have to look at every program that is not legally mandated [by
the state],” says superior court chief administrative officer Paul
Sherfey, who estimates drug court costs the county about $1.2 million a
year. Although Sherfey thinks the county may continue to fund drug
court in 2009, he speaks gravely of the prospects for the following
years. “In the future, the budget gets worse,” he says.

Cutting drug court seems especially shortsighted, because any
savings from reducing or eliminating the drug-court budget would
eventually turn up as increased taxpayer costs for incarcerating drug
offenders. The county estimates that the 66 people who graduated the
program in March 2008 saved $1.4 million in state prison costs, and
another $150,000 in county jail expenses.

Under the current proposal, the county would stop accepting drug
cases involving possession of fewer than three grams—about 1,400
low-level drug offenses per year. Those offenses, according to Leesa
Manion, chief of staff for the prosecutor’s office, would be diverted
to municipal and district courts.

That could create a hairball of legal and fiscal problems:
Possessing any amount of hard drugs in Washington is a felony, but
municipal and district courts can only charge people with misdemeanors,
so those courts would need to charge defendants with misdemeanors,
rather than the felonies for which they were arrested. If found guilty,
offenders could still be sent to county jail. The city, meanwhile, has
made it clear that it has no intention of paying jail costs for those
offenders. In other words, the plan could still cost the county
thousands of dollars to jail each offender—without the financial
benefits of putting the defendants through drug court.

The final budget decisions will be left to the county council, where
drug court has at least one staunch supporter, Council Member Larry
Gossett. Although Gossett concedes, “It’s going to be a challenge to
keep drug court or keep cuts at the same level of other services,” he
vows to fight for it.

Drug court graduate Wallace is skeptical of transferring low-level
drug defendants to the city courts. “If they’re not going to provide
them the same benefits, it’s not going to work,” he says.

dominic@thestranger.com