Drug Courts after Twenty Years: What Next?
I’ve been meaning to blog about the interesting new report from the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers on drug courts, but alum Tony Cotton (a member of the NACDL Board of Directors) has beaten me to the punch. (For my own take on drug courts — voicing some of the same concerns as Tony — see this recent article.) Tony offers these insightful and timely thoughts on drug courts:
This year marks the twentieth anniversary of a criminal justice innovation that was supposed to help solve the drug problem in this country and reduce the mass incarceration of men and women whose substance abuse habits lead them toward criminal behavior and, more often than not, to prison.
In 1989, then-State’s Attorney for Miami-Dade County, Florida (later United States Attorney General) Janet Reno designed a new approach to mitigate the crushing loads of drug-related criminal cases in South Florida. Defendants charged with low-level drug felonies would be diverted into treatment programs instead of prison. The idea caught on, and today there are 2,100 such “problem solving” courts around the country, receiving federal funds and dealing with not only drug abuse, but also drunk drivers and domestic violence offenders.
Does Lake Lanier hold an important message about the possibility for economic growth in the Milwaukee area? If so, it’s a message that business and political leaders in Wisconsin need to move with urgency, boldness, and vision if they want to make southeast Wisconsin the hub of freshwater-related business in North America.
As Congress enters the final stretch in pushing forward a health care reform bill, I have been struck by the fact that during the ongoing debate very few people seem to pose the question of whether access to health care constitutes a human right. Yet, in many countries around the world, this perspective forms the starting point of their national debates—and this consensus inevitably directs their public policy on universal health care.