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Public Affairs coverage from our award-winning staff |
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Drug Courts Have Nowhere to Send Addicts
Produced by Rob Wildeboer on Wednesday, June 17, 2009
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Cook County Courthouse (Photo by Jonathan Lurie) |
The brinksmanship over the state budget has taken a step closer to the brink. The agency that provides drug treatment as an alternative to prison in Illinois is refusing to take clients -- and they're cutting off the clients they already have.
It seems like a perennial event. Illinois legislators fashion the state budget and talk about cuts and taxes. Community organizations whose funding is tied to the political gamesmanship surrounding the budget process are forced to hold protests and make doomsday predictions.
HEAPS: We have never been in this kind of situation before.
Melody Heaps is the president of TASC, Treatment Alternatives for Safe Communities. It's an organization that provides drug treatment. Many of its clients have been charged with crimes and avoid doing time by agreeing to go through treatment. But the current budget crisis has led Heaps to take a drastic step.
HEAPS: I have stopped in take. Right now, today alone, there are 11-hundred to 14-hundred people who are sitting in jails or in the community who need to be sent to treatment who have very serious crimes and we are saying to the court and the community, we can not treat them.
Heaps says this isn't sabre rattling to keep state funding. She says she's not making idle threats. She says she's sent letters to all the presiding judges and prosecutors in the state telling them that TASC won't take any new clients. It means that people who have committed drug crimes may flood the jails because there's no alternative sentence for judges to rely on. That means increased costs for the criminal justice system in the long run and immediate costs for communities.
HEAPS: We're talking about people who are in our communities and are active addicts and we understand that if you are addicted you don't get your drugs legally.
Heaps says if funding is cut, neighborhoods are going to be less safe.
CROSS: We have a spending problem we don't know how to say no.
Tom Cross is the Republican leader in the state house. Republicans say the doomsday scenarios being sounded out by groups like TASC are being manufactured to pass the income tax increase proposed by Governor Pat Quinn. Indeed Tasc, the drug treatment program, is mobilizing it's political muscle. The agency is sending out letters to it's clients alerting them that they are being cut off because of a lack of money, and they are also asking their clients to contact legislators about the funding. Quinn says he's still hopeful that massive cuts can be avoided and that legislators can come to some sort of compromise and find a way to save programs that are worried about being cut.
QUINN: Well I think all of the people involved in the meeting are very talented men and women of good faith and I think there's a yearning to solve the problem.
Legislators are scheduled to be in Springfield next week, hopefully working out a budget.
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Jeffrey Collord, Evanston // Thursday, June 18, 2009 @ 9:04 AM
This was a very good report, and the situation regarding drug treatment is dire. Melody Heaps is an excellent advocate for the field. It should be noted, however, that TASC does NOT provide drug treatment; it provides referral. I recommend WBEZ also contact treatment providers. There are many in Chicago who would love the opportunity to tell what will happen when their funding is cut 74%, as some have been told by the State it will be.
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Doc Banks, Rockford // Thursday, June 18, 2009 @ 3:09 PM
Jeffery, to correct you TASC provides Case Management services bridging local courts and treatment.
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Theresa Markham, Edgewater, Chicago // Friday, June 19, 2009 @ 12:52 PM
My husband is a career services councelor at Victor C. Neumann agency. Any politician who calls these "doomsday" scenarios "manufactured" for any reason is a politician that my husband will have PLENTY of time to campaign AGAINST while he is collecting unemployment after July 1. He's already been informed that if these cuts go through, they include his job. This is a VERY REAL situation. The next politician who tells me they won't support a tax hike for new programs to make Quinn look good will also be on the list to campaign against. Why are social services ALWAYS the first thing to get cut? If you won't support the tax increase, cut the budget somewhere else. How about you take a pay cut, Senator Cross?
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Jessica H., Rogers Park, Chicago // Monday, June 22, 2009 @ 7:05 PM
Amen Theresa. I have been a social worker for seventeen years, and the effects of these cuts will be devastating to, individuals families and children all over the state. Isn't it ironic that such draconian cuts to social services are being proposed during such difficult economic times when these programs are most needed!
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