While Mingo County is not among that number, Circuit Court Chief Judge Michael Thornsbury says this county has been running a “de facto” drug court for over 12 years.
“We don’t have the name drug court,” Thornsbury said. “We are doing the same thing.”
West Virginia has four regional adult drug courts covering 18 counties with six more slated to open this year. Thornsbury believes drug courts will eventually exist in every part of the state.
“There are other provisions that enable us to provide most of the same services,” he said.
Thornsbury said over 90 percent of the cases that come before him are related to drug abuse.
“There are many purposes to sentencing,” the judge said. “Punishment and deterrent from committing the same crime is at the front end of the sentencing. Sometimes it takes a forced period of time to be away from drugs to be clear headed.
Thornsbury then utilizes home confinement and his work program to give the offender a sense of the value of work as well as drug counseling. The judge also sends those with children to parenting skills classes.
He said weekly random drug screens are preformed and monitored by the home confinement officer, the work program director and probation officer. This, in turn, prohibits doctor shopping which has become a major problem in the area.
“I have five or six people reporting back to me daily,” Thornsbury said. “While drug courts report back every month, we are doing it daily.”
Gradually, Thornsbury said the county would cut down on drug screening after the miscreant continues to show progress. Drug screens will continue until the sentence is completed.
“When it works, addicts no longer steal, rob and commit other offenses trying to feed their addictions,” he said. “Unfortunately, some people never get it.”
The National Drug Court Institute found after a decade of research, scientists at the Treatment Research Institute at the University of Pennsylvania concluded, “drug courts outperform virtually all other strategies that have been used with drug-involved offenders.”
Columbia University’s historic analysis of drug courts concluded, “drug use and criminal behavior are substantially reduced while offenders are participating in drug court.”
The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) concluded adult drug court programs considerably reduce crime by “lowering re-arrest and conviction rates among drug court graduates well after program completion.”
A more recent four-year study by the Northwest Professional Research Consortium, Inc. found “parents enrolled in family treatment drug courts were more likely than parents in traditional child welfare case processing both to complete treatment and to be reunified with their children.”
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