By Elva K. Osterreich
Alamogordo Daily News
ALAMOGORDO, N.M. — During an Eagle Forum meeting last week, 12th Judicial District Judge Jerry H. Ritter spoke about his decision to close down Juvenile Drug Court in Otero County.
“I’ve had to make the right decisions for the right reasons,” Ritter said at the meeting.
Ritter described Juvenile Drug Court as an intensive probation program designed to rehabilitate youth before they become adults.
“It involves parents,” Ritter said. “It’s not just dealing with one guy. With a kid, you have to deal with the school, the parents anywhere from one to three or more of them the grandparents and others.”
Juvenile Drug Court, which began in Otero County with federal seed money 11 years ago, integrates with the judicial system’s process and is non-adversarial, Ritter said. It provides access to a continuum of services, monitoring activities, ongoing interaction with the juvenile and monitors their achievement.
“The team includes a judge, the Public Defender’s office, District Attorney’s office, schools, police, counselors and more,” he said.
The primary reason Ritter decided to stop the program is the budget, he said. The money for drug courts in the 12th Judicial District was allocated to three programs, including the adult drug court and the Lincoln County juvenile program.
In 2009, the budget for the three programs was $835,000 and in 2011 it is $529,000, Ritter said. That’s a reduction of $441,000 in three years.
“In three fiscal years, our (the 12th Judicial District overall) budgets have been cut by more than half,” Ritter said. “With these budget cuts we have to keep the core constitutional functions maintained.”
He also said the case load on the courts increases three or four percent each year, and more people are going to court without attorneys, which makes the courts less efficient. When people represent themselves, they sometimes don’t know what they need to do and court cases have to be rescheduled to take care of business.
The 12th Judicial District has a jury trial rate of 16 per judge each year, Ritter said. In Albuquerque, the rate is two jury trials per judge per year.
“We are one of the highest in the state,” he said.
Part of the budget crunch on Juvenile Drug Court also involves new restrictions on roles within the system. The court has a director and administrative assistants employed and it used to be able to use the administrative assistants for most of the things that needed to be done. But now the administrative assistants can’t perform some of the necessary tasks, such as collecting urine samples from the subjects.
“We have lost our flexibility,” Ritter said.
Ritter said he closed the court not only over funding issues although the budget was definitely the biggest factor but personal reasons as well.
“After 11 years, I’m a little burned out on it,” he admitted.
Juvenile Drug Court takes more than 40 hours a week put in by the team every other week of the year. All team members already work full-load work weeks.
Problematic factors in the efficiency of the court include a tremendous reduction in client populations who qualify for the program, Ritter said. The team has developed different goals over the 11 years.
“When we started out, we decided about 15 kids would be a good client population,” Ritter said. “We met that goal. But the number has really dropped off. We had four active clients on the day the court was suspended.”
Ritter is disappointed in the current slow client progress.
“There has been a shift in thinking,” he said. “We have been losing focus on what we want for the kids. I felt I was struggling hard convincing other people in the team.”
Feeling that clients were being allowed to slide in the management program of Juvenile Drug Court, Ritter was frustrated with the state of the program.
“If all we do is keep kids in a box, we need to let go,” he said. “I think we should be lighting that fire and helping the kids better.”
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