“I Didn’t Know How to Get Sober.”

Drug Treatment Courts Are Changing the Way Bexar County Views Justice

By Claire Treu and Steven Treu

Cherie Reed did not even know what getting sober was. As she saw it, addiction was “just how life was going to be.” That was true until she met Judge Tommy Stolhandske and his Bexar County Drug Treatment Court in 2018. Over ten years of narcotic use, life in and out of homelessness, and isolation from her family and children kept her hopeless. However, “through drug court,” Reed says, “I learned how to literally live life as a person in society.”

Drug courts are relatively new. They were developed in Miami in the 1980s and were implemented in Bexar County in the early 2000s by Judge Alfonso Alonso. Drug courts are different from the regular court system because of their specific focus on populations struggling with chemical addiction. “It’s a program of choice. It’s a program of learning, and it helps you grow if you’re willing to take the tools that they give you,” Reed explains.

In traditional probation, the treatment provider never talks to the judge, but in the drug court, the treatment provider is a part of the staff. Judge Stolhandske sees the provider every two weeks, and the two keep regular contact. “What I saw as a judge,” Stolhandske says, “is that the same people were coming back, and we weren’t really helping them, just kind of processing them through the system.”

In drug courts, though, the role of the judge is different. Stolhandske does not wear a robe and stands right across from where participants speak as they have a conversation. “When I saw him [Stolhandske] just in normal clothes and talking to us like we were normal people, and we were laughing, I was like, this is awkward, this is weird, but I liked it,” Reed recalls about her first Drug Court review.

Bexar County Drug Treatment Courts treat substance abusing offenders in the community, rather than convicting and incarcerating them over and over again. For an addict, gelled in the realities of addiction, the reward of using easily outweighs jail time, according to Stolhandske. Drug courts, though, focus on the needs of their target population, rather than on the strictures of the law. They offer treatment forward, including frequent substance testing, intensive supervision, regular contact with the supervising judge, individualized sanctions and, most importantly, rewards. They target high-risk, high-need individuals—in other words, people who are not responding to the “don’t-do-that-again-or-else” model of the traditional justice system.

Stolhandske argues that drug courts reduce recidivism rates, give individuals tools to change their lives, and save taxpayers money. The statistics prove him right. “We know that drug courts outperform virtually all other strategies that have been attempted for drug-involved offenders,” wrote Douglas Marlowe, David DeMatteo, and David Festinger for the VERA Institute of Justice in 2003. The value of drug courts is seen in their success in reducing recidivism enormously. In 2006, for instance, Marc Levin found that offenders completing drug court programs in Texas had a 28.5% re-arrest rate, as compared to 58.5% for those who did not complete a drug court program. “The best drug courts reduce crime by as much as 45% over other dispositions,” Huddleston and Marlowe note.

Beyond the effectiveness of individual restoration, many scholars, lawyers, and judges claim that drug treatment courts also save taxpayers money. A drug court program typically costs between $2,500 and $4,000 annually for each offender. By comparison, the annual cost per Texas prison inmate is more than $16,000, writes Levin. In 2008, the Urban Institute concluded that, nationally speaking, drug courts produced an average of $2.21 for every $1 invested, and when services were targeted toward more serious, higher-risk drug offenders, the return on investment was $3.36 for every $1 invested. These savings are attributable to reduced re-arrests, fewer law enforcement contacts, fewer court hearings, and decreased demand for jail or prison beds.

Reliance on substance is often coupled with a sense of lost control, mental illness, or trauma. When the reliance turns criminal, the initial societal response is to punish, not heal, which ineffectively strips the addict of all control and re-traumatizes him or her. Drug courts take a restorative justice approach of repairing harm from crime, as opposed to the contemporary retributive justice approach of punishing crime.

Cherie Reed says she attends “pro-social” events - like the kickball game above - as a mentor to help current Drug Court participants the way she was helped. Judge Tommy Stolhanske (far right in blue cubs t-shirt) attends to support the group.

Photo courtesy of Court Manager Roberto Ruiz.

Judge Tommy Stolhandske (middle, grey suit) with graduates of the Treatment Recovery Accountability Court A, team members and the Therapeutic Court Mentors at the 2019 Winter Commencement.

Photo courtesy of Court Manager Roberto Ruiz.

When it comes to drug related offenses, the retributive justice approach moves offenders from one kind of prison to another. Individuals go from being imprisoned by their addictions, to being imprisoned by their states, without any real reform occurring. The restorative justice approach, though, changes the way offenders are treated and sees certain drug crimes as a response to one’s addiction. The way to solve those sorts of crimes is to address the substance dependence, not to lock the person up. “Drug courts are not soft on crime. Instead of isolating an offender in prison, they force participants to confront their addiction and repair the damage they have done to themselves, their families, and their communities,” Marc Levin writes in a 2006 article for the Texas Public Policy Foundation.

Cherie Reed has been sober since May 25, 2018, with the support of Judge Stolhandske and his Drug Treatment Court. She is now employed and was asked to work at the same sober house she used to live in. Reed completed her GED and talks to her children every day. Having to remove essentially all of her teeth as a result of her drug use, Haven for Hope helped Reed replace her smile. “I never thought I would smile with my teeth ever again,” Reed said, “and I get to do that today.”

Claire M. Treu is a 2020 graduate and winner of the Paul Delp Award in Peace Studies from Chapman University. For the past three years she was a frequent writer on local Southern California news.

Steve Treu is a Shareholder in Langley & Banack, Inc.’s San Antonio office. His practice focuses on Civil Litigation, Commercial Litigation, Real Estate Litigation, Collections Law, Extraordinary Remedies, Landlord-Tenant, Construction Disputes, and Liens & Bonding Law.