Meet Richard, a 23-year-old who has been booked into jail 14 times for larceny, burglary, failure to appear, possession of heroin and drug paraphernalia. In the past three years, he has spent 681 days in the Santa Fe County jail at a cost of $65,000.
Meet Rose, a 25-year-old with a history of cocaine and heroin use who is regularly picked up for shoplifting and burglary. She has been arrested 16 times, spending 316 days in jail and costing taxpayers $30,000.
Then there is Tina, who has no violent arrests, but shoplifts to support a heroin habit. She has spent 348 days in jail at a cost of $33,000.
The three — these are not their real names — are among the top 100 property crime and drug offenders, who have been arrested a total of 590 times by Santa Fe police officers since 2010. Police officers have spent 5,000 hours on these offenders; prosecutors and public defenders, a combined 15,000 hours. The average cost of their arrests, court proceedings, time in custody and supervision is $42,000 each. Together, the top 100 offenders have racked up 11,500 days in jail, in addition to emergency medical transport, doctor visits and overnight hospital stays.
The total bill: $4.1 million over three years, and that is a conservative estimate, according to an analysis by the Santa Fe Community Foundation. The study examined real cases but did not name the offenders.
“We’re chasing the same people over and over again,” said Santa Fe police Capt. Jerome Sanchez, who as head of the Property Crimes Division knows many of the arrestees and their family members by name. “I don’t know a single person we’ve arrested for property crime who’s not a drug addict. We’re banging our heads against the wall,” he said, describing a criminal justice system that is not solving the real problem.
The Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion program, or LEAD, a new program approved by the City Council on Jan. 29 after a year of study, may finally give Sanchez a chance to help some of these offenders break the cycle of addiction and arrest.
Started in Seattle, LEAD is being brought to Santa Fe after Mayor David Coss heard about it at a drug summit in Española from Emily Kaltenbach of the Drug Policy Alliance. Instead of sending minor offenders back into the criminal justice system, LEAD offers them a chance to obtain essential wraparound services, such as housing, job training, transportation, counseling and addiction treatment — all of which might help them stay away from crime and live a better life.
The contract to provide the case management and oversight for LEAD was awarded to The Life Link, a transitional living program at 2325 Cerrillos Road with a variety of community services and counseling programs.
But the effort is the culmination of work by a 30-member task force composed of law enforcement, public health and treatment managers, with other input from community organizations including Solace, the Drug Policy Alliance, Indian tribes, the Santa Fe Recovery Center, Santa Fe Mountain Center, Christus St. Vincent Regional Medical Center and the Santa Fe Community Foundation. Many of those involved deal directly with counseling and addiction services.
Only by coming together and by digging into records at the jail and at Christus St. Vincent Regional Medical Center, La Familia Medical Center, the fire department, the District Attorney’s Office and the New Mexico Public Defender Department, as well as court logs and police case files, was the task force able to paint the big picture of how much addiction is draining community resources.
“It’s mind-boggling,” Coss said, to see what Christus St. Vincent, the police department, the jail and social workers have to deal with each and every time the same person is arrested. “It’s frustrating to arrest someone 17 times,” he said.
Carol Luna Anderson, Life Link executive director, said the collaboration that has launched the program will continue. It was the city’s focus on intensive individual case management that moved Life Link to bid on the contract as the provider for LEAD. Life Link has the staff and expertise because it already handles services for some 425 clients a month who need counseling, housing and other services.
Anderson said one important component will be peer-led support, and Life Link has volunteers who have been through counseling and are now trained and certified to help others.
At the same time, professional counselors and social workers can reach out to community support programs, depending on client needs — housing vouchers, GED diplomas or job training, even help with bus transportation and adult education classes. The challenge, Anderson said, is that many who need services don’t have a driver’s license or a vehicle and need help “putting all that together.”
“Maybe it’s stable housing or job skills.We can work to address not only the addiction, but the mental health and trauma issues that might make [clients] better and change some of the self-defeating behaviors,” Anderson said.
The city has budgeted $100,000 during the current fiscal year and another $200,000 next year for the case management contract and to pay for other services, though some of the costs will be covered by Medicaid and other public assistance. The city also has requested $200,000 from the Legislature, and the task force is seeking support from private foundations.
State Sen. Nancy Rodriguez, D-Santa Fe, who serves on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said she finds the initiative appealing because she knows there is no drug treatment available once someone goes to jail or prison, nor can offenders receive needed counseling and support services.
“We know that substance abuse is a big problem that manifests itself in crime. We are not providing enough rehab in the state and [people] aren’t getting the treatment in the jail,” she said. “The wraparound services, I think, will be very essential to the success here.”
Joohee Rand, director of strategic initiatives for the Santa Fe Community Foundation, said the program in Seattle, started in 2011, has financial support from the downtown business community, one neighborhood significantly impacted by property and drug crime.
According to a Community Policing Dispatch, a law enforcement newsletter, the Seattle effort will be evaluated after two full years of operation so that analysis might be available by the end of 2014. “It’s too early to tell about the program’s overall effectiveness, but many LEAD clients have experienced remarkable success already,” according to an April 2013 article. “Others have experienced setbacks, but continue to stay engaged with the program. … It’s also hoped that LEAD will be proven more cost-effective than traditional drug law enforcement. To assess this, a robust evaluation and cost/benefit assessment will be conducted for LEAD after its first two years of operation.”
The goal in Santa Fe is to start with perhaps six clients as early as March and grow LEAD slowly, depending on funding and the availability of services. Not everyone will qualify, as the police have said only nonviolent offenders who use drugs themselves or dealers selling to support their own usage would qualify.
“We really are a small community and really know these criminals and who would be helped,” said Celina Westervelt, a police department spokeswoman.
Rand is the one who pulled together all the data for an economic impact analysis on the program. Not only were the records scattered among 10 different agencies, but some of them were not even available digitally. So the police case files on the top 100 offenders had to be retrieved by going through paper files. Other reports by health providers were only available with confidentiality protections.
Of the 100 top offenders, 90 were back in custody within six months, according to Rand’s analysis. And many of those people were quite young, so that incarceration really impacted their ability to find work and live on their own after release, which led to more crime.
“What’s happening now is a 90 percent failure rate, Rand said. “They’re going back to jail, so you’re just reinforcing the system.”
Even by conservative estimates and with modest success, the program will save taxpayers money. And Rand said she isn’t even counting the emotional toll on families and the lost wages of those who may not work because of incarceration.
But the real measure of success might hinge on the most controversial part of LEAD, the understanding that those who are addicted to drugs and alcohol do not have to remain sober for the rest of their lives. Abuse counselors and experts in New Mexico have long put aside this notion. Instead, they practice harm reduction, which strives to get clients off the most dangerous drugs, such as heroin and opioids, stabilize their lifestyle and keep them in a medically supervised treatment program, which often involves Suboxone.
Unlike morphine, Suboxone is prescribed by a doctor and filled with a prescription. As a semi-synthetic opioid, it satisfies some of the cravings of heroin and other drugs, but it has a safer leveling effect on most patients so they can manage with normalcy.
Life Link already has physician and a Suboxone treatment program.
“A harm-reduction approach is a little bit different than what most people think about,” Anderson said. “One hundred percent sobriety, over time that might not be the best approach. You want them to get off the worst imaginable drug, get off heroin. You don’t have to be clean and totally sober the rest of your life to do that.”
“If they can get on treatment and not be out there stealing, that, for us, is a success,” said Santa Fe Detective Casey Salazar.
Added Sanchez, “We have to change our tactics, we have to change what we do in crime prevention. Jailing people just isn’t fixing it.”
Contact Bruce Krasnow at 986-3024 or brucek@sfnewmexican.com.
