By Tonya Alanez
Sun-Sentinel
BOWARD. Fla. — She was a runaway at 14. She abused drugs for more than 25 years. At 38, Sandra Huffman was living under a bridge with nothing but her hunger for crack cocaine sustaining her.
A Broward County drug-court judge ordered Huffman into an intensive 90-day, in-jail treatment program that opened the door to recovery.
“Without it, I would probably be in prison or I would probably still be under that bridge,” said Huffman, now 42 years old and three years sober.
But with the Broward Sheriff’s Office’s shrinking budget, the program that helped the Fort Lauderdale woman and hundreds of others came to an end this summer.
A last-minute budget compromise in September saved a 30-day program, but it was the longer treatment plan for addiction that many beneficiaries, Huffman among them, feel was much more effective.
Nobody disagrees that the program was invaluable in turning lives around, but faced with a $109-million budget deficit, the County Commission had to make hard choices and leaned on Sheriff Al Lamberti to do the same.
“Drug-treatment programs make sense,” Lamberti said. “And the people who run them are dedicated to their tasks. But we have to cut somewhere, even when it’s painful.”
Were it not for the program, Huffman believes, she might never have crossed the threshold into recovery.
“Mentally I was just broken,” she said in an interview. “I was completely just out of it. I was hopeless. I had nowhere to go. I was grateful, actually, that [the judge] had sentenced me to the 90-day program.”
With no medical insurance to foot the bills, Huffman had never before had a realistic chance at breaking her crack habit. Today, her two children again live with her; she works two jobs as a waitress and has become an active member in the recovery community.
“These programs have played an important layer in the overall system to help reduce recidivism and return individuals to the community as productive members,” said Kristina Gulick, director of the Sheriff’s Office Department of Community Control.
Huffman was arrested in 2005 for drug paraphernalia possession and writing bad checks. She believes the in-jail treatment program’s therapy, daily group sessions, one-on-one counseling, parenting classes, workbooks, church meetings, and counselors who would facilitate work and housing on the outside made all the difference in her life.
“We dealt with childhood issues, we dealt with abuse issues, there was a lot more than just substance abuse,” Huffman said. “We got to the root causes of what our issues were in the first place.”
Last year, 851 Broward inmates went through the 90-day program and 4,336 took the 30-day program. In total, 17,333 went through all in-custody programs available to inmates in the county jails, including life-skills, anger-management, basic-computer skills classes and others.
As a result of a last-minute decision by county officials to use the jail’s commissary funds and a state trust fund fed by defendant fees, the 30-day program, and only it, was salvaged.
Broward Drug Court Judge Marcia Beach said she is thankful for what was saved, but believes the loss of the 90-day program will be devastating.
“I feel so sad about it, sad and emotional,” Beach said. “It doesn’t make financial sense from a taxpayer’s perspective, it doesn’t make human sense ... It doesn’t make sense from a criminal-justice perspective. It doesn’t make any common sense.”
If an inmate successfully completed the 90-day program, Beach said, they could see their sentence reduced, saving taxpayers in the long run an estimated $11 million a year.
Now, in many cases Beach said she will have little choice but to send addicts to prison, because they can no longer receive treatment in jail. A sad choice, the judge said, because it is often addiction that drives criminal activity.
“Many of them have never been able to access treatment in their lives and they’re ready for it,” Beach said. “It was a program that you knew if you ordered someone into it, and they successfully completed it, it could have a life-changing effect on them.”
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