By Sarah Volpenhein
Grand Forks Herald
GRAND FORKS, N.D. — Every week or so, Grand Forks District Judge Don Hager meets with adult offenders, not to hand down penalties, but to talk about treatment.
“It’s me as a judge trying to get them to open up a little bit and ... tell me how they’ve been doing,” Hager said.
Regular meetings with a judge are one piece of Grand Forks’ District Court’s Drug Court, a program that puts addicted offenders through treatment under the supervision of the court, in the hope they will not come before the judge again with charges of drug possession or driving under the influence.
The North Dakota Senate recently killed a bill that proponents argued would have made it easier to establish problem-solving courts, such as Drug Courts, across the state.
Problem-solving courts have emerged as a different way of looking at court cases with treatment in mind. They are meant to treat the underlying problems that may be driving an offender’s criminal behavior, such as chemical addiction or mental illness.
Though Drug Court is the most common type of problem-solving court, others include Mental Health Court and Veterans Court.
Officials from the North Dakota Court System, Department of Corrections and the Protection and Advocacy Project testified before legislators in support of Senate Bill 2161, which ultimately failed by a 6-41 vote in the Senate April 14.
The bill would have established a longstanding committee composed of representatives from the criminal justice system, human services and the Legislature to examine whether there is a need and whether it would be feasible to put a problem-solving court in a jurisdiction and to make recommendations to the North Dakota Supreme Court.
“It’s been a broker deal,” said Supreme Court Chief Justice Gerald Vandewalle. “We haven’t had everyone sitting at the table discussing at the same time, ‘Is this feasible? Is this sustainable?’”
Bill voted down
Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee Sen. David Hogue, R-Minot, said in part, the bill failed because the committee mirrored too closely the Commission on Alternatives to Incarceration, which comes up for renewal Aug. 1, 2017.
Part of the commission’s directive is to study the “expanded use of problem-solving court.”
But court officials say the committee would have being doing something entirely different.
Whereas the commission is largely made up of legislators and makes policy decisions, State Court Administrator Sally Holewa said the committee proposed by the bill would have done the planning.
“I’ll use for an example, the DUI Court that Judge (Bradley) Cruff started down in Wahpeton,” she said. “He wants to start it; he gets the money to do it. He can’t find treatment, so he’s beating the bushes looking for treatment. He’s calling up DHS and saying, ‘Will you recognize evaluations done by a Minnesota person?’ This committee would have done that work for him because it would have brought everyone to the table ... identified the specific providers, talked about the process for getting the evaluation from Minnesota recognized and paid for.”
The Commission on Alternatives to Incarceration would not do that kind of work, Holewa said, saying it is not their role.
Hogue also raised concerns with the idea of problem-solving courts, adding whether or not other types of problem-solving courts, like mental health courts, should be created in North Dakota is a question for the legislators.
“Do you want to treat veterans differently in criminal court than you do other citizens? That’s a threshold policy question,” he said. “That question belongs squarely in the policy branch of government.”
Other legislators expressed similar concerns. In a hearing on the bill in the House Judiciary Committee, Chairman Kim Koppelman, R-West Fargo, asked, “When does (the court) get so bifurcated that the court is no longer the court?”
The Legislature has already authorized Drug Courts, but Mental Health Courts and Veterans Courts, of which there are none in the state, have not been authorized.
But Holewa said the committee would not have side-stepped the Legislature.
“If you wanted to create mental health or veterans or homeless courts or prison reentry (Courts), sure we’d be going to the Legislature” for approval, she said.
She said the committee would have enabled its members to look at whether there was a need for mental health, veterans or other courts in the state and then go to the Legislature to ask for approval, along with a plan for their implementation to back up their proposal.
A treatment-based solution
Problem-solving courts have become a way for the courts to steer offenders to treatment rather than jail, a way to try to thwart the “revolving door.”
There are five Adult Drug Courts in North Dakota — two in Fargo and one each in Bismarck, Grand Forks and Minot — according to Holewa. There are six active Juvenile Drug Courts statewide — one each in Bismarck, Devils Lake, Fargo, Grand Forks and Minot, and one shared by Jamestown and Valley City. Wahpeton holds an Adult DUI Court.
Former Judge Sonja Clapp, who retired in December, was involved in setting up Grand Forks’ Adult and Juvenile Drug Courts, which were launched in August 2008 and have collectively graduated 55 participants as of mid-February.
The Drug Courts came at a time when they were being pushed. In 2007, at the request of the Commission on Alternatives to Incarceration, the Legislature approved funding for three more full-time positions in the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation and four more full-time addiction counselors through Human Services, according to a memorandum prepared by Legislative Council.
The structure of Drug Court, said Clapp, is important to seeing participants succeed.
“Just like with Drug Court, if you have a court and other agencies overseeing their progress, you can ensure the fact that they are following the treatment protocol,” she said. “If they’re left to do it on their own, oftentimes because of the particular illness, they just don’t have the ability to do that.”
During the decade Clapp spent on the bench, she saw a need for mental health courts and other problem-solving courts. The problem, she said, is that problem-solving courts are resource-intensive and involve a lot of players.
Vandewalle agreed more problem-solving courts would be “helpful,” though he said he “intuitively” believes that.
“I think it’s fair to say most of these mental health cases are people that are not taking their medications,” he said. “This committee would (have) help(ed) with experts at the table to tell us ‘Would a Mental Health Court in which they appear weekly before the judge ... be helpful in keeping them on their meds or not?’”
With the bill voted down, Vandewalle and Holewa said they will continue doing what they have been doing: pulling stakeholders together on an ad hoc basis when a problem-solving court is requested.