A plug for drug courts in 8th Circuit’s Booker mania
As noted in this post last week, I have long given up on keeping up with all the action in Eighth Circuit, which now seems to hand down at least a half-dozen sentencing decisions each day. Today, with nearly 15 rulings on this official opinion page, the Eighth Circuit may have set a new one-day record.
Though I continue to rely on readers to help me identify any major jurisprudential needles hidden in the Eighth Circuit Booker haystacks, an interesting concurrence from today’s dispositions caught my eye. In US v. Baccam, No. 03-2133 (8th Cir. July 13, 2005) (available here), an otherwise ordinary drug case gets a little twist when Judge Donald Lay added this concurrence to make a pitch for drug courts:
I concur in the judgment of the court. I write separately to highlight the limited efficacy of an inflexible federal criminal justice policy that responds to the epidemic of drug crimes without adequately addressing the root cause of this epidemic — drug addiction. Many states have created specialized drug courts that approach this epidemic with much greater success. In most drug courts, nonviolent, substance-abusing offenders charged with drug-related crimes are channeled into judicially supervised substance abuse treatment, mandatory drugs testing, and other rehabilitative services in an effort to reduce recidivism. Eligible offenders typically have the charges against them stayed and dropped if treatment is successful, or plead guilty with prosecution deferred and criminal punishment withheld if treatment is successful. Evidence shows that the flexible and pro-active approach of drug courts reduces recidivism rates to less than half of the recidivism rate of those offenders who are simply imprisoned for their drug crimes. Unfortunately, the federal criminal justice system offers no such alternatives for nonviolent, substance-abusing offenders. Given the tremendous economic and human costs of imprisoning nonviolent drug offenders, Congress should seriously consider creating federal drug courts. Federal drug courts would save a significant amount of money for taxpayers.
As detailed in this post, Judge Lay has previously called for the development of a federal drug courts program on the op-ed pages of the New York Times. Now his insights will also appear in the august pages of F.3d.