(C) Daily Yonder - Keep it Rural This story was originally published by Daily Yonder - Keep it Rural and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Recovery Court: Judge Says His Rural Community Is Ready for More Than ‘Lock Them Up’ [1] ['Sara June Jo-Sæbo', 'The Daily Yonder'] Date: 2023-12-14 Part three of a series A drug court alternative to incarceration – known locally as Recovery Court — was introduced in Grayson and Carroll counties, Virginia, in 2019 by Judges Lee Harrell and Brett Geisler. In 2022, Harrell spurred the effort to add a fitness requirement to the regimen. Sara June Jo-Sæbo talked with him about his experience as a judge in Southwest Virginia – a place he refers to as an “epicenter of the opioid crisis.” Why are you offering an alternative to incarceration for drug offenses? Based on a profound awareness that the incarceration/probation cycle does not fix substance use disorder and it exacerbates the problem. We end up spending more money continually incarcerating people for short amounts of time on drug charges instead of providing them with intensive rehabilitative services that might offer the chance to get an upper hand on their substance use disorder and stop the endless cycle of incarceration and probation. In your position as a district judge, have you observed a change in the numbers of people coming through your court with substance use disorder? Continually increases. Part of this Drug Court program is to reduce the numbers incarcerated for drug-related crime? Yes, I’m really just trying to help people. That’s the main thing – just trying to help people. People are not going to get the help they need in a traditional conviction-incarceration-probation cycle. Do other judges offer a fitness requirement in their drug court? That’s different. Nobody else has that, I can promise you that. We’re the only ones that do that. There’s your unique factor and they (the drug court leadership for Virginia) know about it, but I don’t know what they think about it. They didn’t have to approve that though. We just did it. Is your Recovery Court model with a fitness component working? Are people having better success at staying on track? Yes. And the main reason I can tell you it’s working is because it’s created a profound sense of connection and community. Prior to doing this, I’m embarrassed to say, I often didn’t know the (drug offender’s) names, had no relationship with them. I would see them once every other week in a courtroom setting very formally and a report would be given by the administrator of the program. For example (the probation administrator would say in court), “This is XYZ and this person is not doing well. They had a relapse and we need to decide what to do about the relapse.” It was a really impersonal relationship. When we started doing Recovery Fitness, it changed that tremendously; it created a very personal interaction that Judge Geisler and I have developed with the participants. We know them really well now. We’ve sweated with them in Recovery Fitness. We’ve suffered with them. We’ve come to know their families, their kids. People bring their moms, boyfriends, girlfriends, neighbors. We get to know them now on a personal level — that is where I think it’s working. Recovery Fitness has developed a sense of community that was lacking before. Let me understand this: before you started Recovery Fitness … someone might have relapsed a couple times. Now, when they’re exercising with you, they’re not relapsing as much? Yes, I feel like our rate of relapse is much lower than it used to be. We don’t keep empirical numbers. But I feel like it’s much lower. I also feel like we have a new sense of accountability through doing this that engenders in our participants a genuine feeling of self improvement — an (ability) to step outside of their comfort zone. And there is a lot of growth that occurs when they do something that they were afraid to do before. That comes in sort of a symbolic – but real – manifestation: when you lift a barbell over your head – something that you had never done before or think that you’d be able to do. We’re dealing with folks who are often physically broken; a lot of them have medical conditions due to drug use (making them) physically weak. And taking them through a course of physical fitness – not only has the obvious benefits that physical fitness has – but it empowers them to (do) something they thought they could never do. And watch themselves do it and watch their peers do it and watch themselves grow… that is very empowering. It’s tangible: I used to not be able to lift this barbell up and now I can. What are the pitfalls of being a judge who has a personal connection with people you’re trying to help? The biggest pitfall is that you develop a relationship with these people, and when they screw up and they have to come back in front of us to be adjudicated or sentenced, we (judges) sometimes can’t do it. We have to recuse ourselves because we have this relationship and we’re biased. We have to ask another judge to come in and handle the case for us. That’s difficult because our judicial system is already strained; we have very few retired judges or substitute judges (who are able to fill in). The other terribly sad pitfall is when they do screw up and you’ve really come to (care about) them… you feel so crushed. We had two (participants) who had a devastating relapse and picked up all these new charges. We had to terminate them out of the program. It was really sad. You feel like you failed. You feel like you failed them. It’s embarrassing because the public knows. And not everyone loves this idea (of drug courts). I used to be a hard-nosed prosecutor. There’s an appetite out there for incarceration (for drug offenders) and it’s not completely unwarranted – there’s a lot of crime that goes on related to drugs that, at times, can be violent. It’s hard to get the community behind the notion of let’s try something else here; let’s do something less restrictive. When you have very public failures, it’s tough. Can you expand on that and how a rural district might be willing or unwilling to try new ways to deal with drug offenders? Like my assumption is that rural communities prefer incarceration over less restrictive rehabilitation programs. I don’t know exactly. I’m not sure if that assumption is correct or not… it certainly exists but I don’t know how truthful it is. There’s an appetite for “be tough” and “lock-em-up.” Does it exist more in a rural area than an urban area? (It’s an assumption) but is it really true? Here’s why (I don’t think it’s true that rural districts prefer incarcerating drug offenders)… there’s hardly anyone in this community who isn’t personally touched by substance use issues. Nearly everyone you run into has a family member or loved one that has suffered from this. I think you can find a lot more forgiveness out there. It might not be something people wear on their sleeves. But when you get down to it and talk to people personally, they may have more of a bend toward “let’s find a solution to this.” So I haven’t felt a lot of resistance in the community… but I’m always aware that we really need to do well and I feel a lot of pressure on me and these participants to do well and demonstrate that Recovery Court works. I hope people are supportive of what we’re doing because it really comes out of good place and, I’ll tell you what, it really does save money because we’re incarcerating people less. (We spend on average in the United States) around $45,771/year per prisoner to incarcerate somebody and keeping them out (of jail) is certainly cheaper. Can you do it in a way that they won’t re-offend? That’s where the magic happens financially, it’s why we’re trying to get people strong enough where they don’t re-offend. What financial costs are involved with your Recovery Fitness program? Very little. (Expenses for the training program developed by trainer Walter Midkiff is supported with county funds) which I believe comes from the Opioid Abatement Authority (OAA) of Virginia — that’s the agency that oversees this giant settlement with the Sacklers (who controlled Purdue Pharma, which manufactured Oxycontin). Virginia got a billion dollars and the OAA is responsible for (allocating moneys) over a period of 10 years and the money has to be spent specifically on opioid abatement. We have applied for and won grants that help us defray the costs of Recovery Fitness and all the services we provide in Recovery Court. We are looking to expand. For instance, transportation – which is a huge problem for us (in rural areas) because our participants go great distances to get to all the places they need to go, they gotta have reliable transportation and most of them don’t. Housing is a giant problem. One of the biggest issues that leads to relapse is people can’t change “people, places, and things” so they’re often in the same environment that they were in when they were using (drugs). This is a particularly big problem in rural areas because that’s how we live. We live in our little communities and we don’t have easy access to change up those communities like somebody in a big city does. In a big city, you can move three blocks over and it’s a whole different world; there’s totally different stores, totally different people. You can disappear in a city. You can’t disappear in Hillsville (Virginia). You can’t disappear in Independence. There’s nowhere to go. So finding housing is a huge issue. Most of these people go right back into the same housing they were in when they picked up their charges and that’s a giant cause of relapse. The same people you were using (drugs) with and now you’re out in Recovery Court – you don’t want to use and there’s meth all over the place where you live. We are hoping that this money from the OAA can be used, not only for Recovery Fitness, but also toward transportation, housing, increasing treatment opportunities, increasing our monitoring abilities. And that’s what’s wonderful about this opioid money – it’s not tax payer money. It’s the Sackler’s money. It’s a real opportunity for us to make a difference. We just have to be careful how we spend it and the OAA has done a wonderful job and they’re pushing for innovative programs and that’s why we got this grant for Recovery Fitness. (When it comes to incarceration of people with substance use disorder,) the stuff we’ve tried in the past just doesn’t work. The substance use problem is the worst I’ve seen it in all my years (in law enforcement) and it just keeps getting worse and worse and worse. It’s not getting better. Nothing’s worked. Do you have any closing thoughts about this program in Southwest Virginia, a rural region where we have the highest incarceration ratios in the state? It just drives home the importance of what we’re doing. Even though it might be on a very small scale, we have to try to help people get help for substance use and break the cycle of incarceration that can run through generations of people. We have completely ignored, in substance use treatment, the physical aspect of it. (Substance use recovery programs) have done huge amounts of work on the mental health and spiritual aspects of it. You’ll know from (programs) like Alcoholics Anonymous, the spiritual aspects – doesn’t have to be Christianity — simply the concept of a higher power; this is woven into substance use treatment. And we have all kinds of treatment modalities that focus on mental health. Mental health and substance use disorder go hand in hand. But for some reason, we’ve ignored this obvious truth that when you exercise, you feel better. When you feel better, you’re much more likely to have your life in order than when you are in a state of chaos. By bringing someone around to a positive physicality, we can impose a structure into their life that is beneficial. Why we’ve ignored this, I have no idea. But it’s just this chasm in substance abuse treatment. I just feel it’s so important to bring these folks back to physical health. It can’t be done just with the spiritual and just with the mental health (aspects). There has to be a physical aspect to it. Sara June Jo-Saebo lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. She wishes to express her thanks to Penny, “a social worker with a big heart who pointed me toward the stake-holders in Recovery Court’s success.” Related Republish This Story Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license. [END] --- [1] Url: https://dailyyonder.com/recovery-court-judge-says-his-rural-community-is-ready-for-more-than-lock-them-up/2023/12/14/ Published and (C) by Daily Yonder - Keep it Rural Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons CC BY-ND 4.0 International. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailyyonder/