In Wisconsin, Judge Everett Mitchell is re-assessing how drug offenders are handled, and treating them with dignity The positive results are staggering
Today, the amount of inmates who are incarcerated because of drug offenses far surpasses all other categories, comprising 45% of the prison population,Drug offenders’ sentences now tend to be significantly longer—62 months on average, a Sentencing Projectsuggests, compared to 22 months in 1986. Research also found drug offense-related incarceration has affected certain minority groups disproportionately.
Adequate treatment to address inmates’ addiction-related needs, however, isn’t always available, according to the Prison Policy Initiative—and the outcome can be grim. The number of new inmates who died of drug and alcohol intoxication while incarcerated reachedFor the most part, Mitchell says, courts haven’t historically been set up to provide the kind of personalized interaction Dane County’s program involves.
turns toward the person he’s speaking to and rarely breaks eye contact. His wardrobe includes familiar looks for a tall, handsome and charismatic public figure: neatly tailored suits and crisp button-up shirts. Years later, after transferring and graduating from Morehouse College in Atlanta with degrees in mathematics and religion, when Mitchell was working toward master of divinity and theology degrees at the Princeton Theological Seminary, memories of the trauma he’d experienced as a child unexpectedly resurfaced, prompting him, he says, to look for a way to meter the related feelings.
Mitchell, who began overseeing drug court in 2019, wasn’t yet involved with the program when, roughly two months after he was elected as a Dane County circuit court judge in April 2016, his mother, who’d been living in Texas, running a business and in good health, became addicted to the opiates she’d been prescribed after a brutal reaction to a brown recluse spider bite.
Despite opioids’ widespread impact, the general public, Mitchell says, is still somewhat unclear about what addiction means, what it looks like and why personal responsibility alone isn’t enough to address it. The judge, she says, also tries to keep participants engaged in other ways, including issuing them community service hours in lieu of jail time for missed urine analysis tests, and focusing on what aspects of their program are going well.
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