The Polk County Meth War, Part Two
The View from the System
Detectives Brian Epperson and Mike Monteith are waiting on a phone call, and when that call comes they’ll stand up and shake my hand and this jailhouse interview will be over. They’ll be driving somewhere to tape a wire to somebody’s chest, so this somebody can go to some house and buy some controlled substance from some dealer about to get his…er…something anatomical busted—which is nothing out of the ordinary for drug detectives.
“[Meth] is a dead end,” says Epperson. “If we don’t catch you, somebody is going to…whether it be a state or federal authority. A lot of people think me and Mike Monteith and the deputies of Polk County are the only ones working and watching ‘em.” He ticks off the jurisdictions that overlap here: DEA, FBI, Forest Service, TVA, TBI, State Troopers, the State Park Service, the 10th Judicial Drug Task Force, and so forth…proving there’s a stove-full of heat in Polk County, to be sure. But like street cops everywhere, he and Monteith rely mainly on The Word.
“If we don’t have the help of the people it makes things a lot harder for us,” Monteith tells me. Anything can be significant; a sharp-eyed neighbor who spots an unfamiliar car with North Carolina plates on Monday, smells an odd odor on Tuesday, and sees an unhappy kid burning a barrel of starter fluid cans on Wednesday…well, with one phone call that neighbor can do more to clean out the neighborhood than Epperson and Monteith can get done unaided in an entire year. They’ll check out such tips, do a “knock-and-talk,” maybe ask for consent to search…and put the cuffs on if there’s cause.
But then they tell me that locking a man up isn’t always about incarcerating him.
Sandra Donaghy, the Chief Assistant District Attorney for the 10th Judicial District, elaborates on this concept as she fills me in on how DAs work the cases detectives like Epperson and Monteith make. (Incidentally, Matt Dunn, the Assistant District Attorney in Charge of Rolling the Rock Back Up the Hill Every Morning, was so busy prosecuting Polk County drug cases at the time of this interview that he couldn’t spare me a few minutes to talk about them…an ironic reminder that as meth steamrollers users, the users steamroller the system—a dynamic bewailed by everyone in the legal community, even high-dollar defense lawyers, but not by anyone who peddles meth for a living.)
At any rate, the DAG’s office draws a hard line on meth manufacture and possession. The class B manufacturing charge carries a sentence of eight-to-twelve, the class C three-to-six, and DAs crack heads even for simple possession, asking for four months. And these aren’t the bulk trafficking cases, where the interests of the community are often better served by elevation to federal jurisdiction—a grim country of mandatory sentences and nary a hope of parole—no, this is how much time the 10th Judicial DAG wants mom-and-pop, Joe Eightball types to serve…in short, average Polk County users.
Jail ain’t fun. Even an addict suffering his own living hell will fear it, but sending offenders there is only half the DAG’s game plan. “If [convicts] haven’t had the benefit of any treatment within the system,” says Donaghy, “we’ve basically put them away for four months, put them right back into the community where they’re with the same friends, the same suppliers, the same everything, and we’ve just inconvenienced them for a while versus really changing their lives.
“Hopefully, that time in the jail will be the time where they can detox…and then if we put them on probation and give them supervision, where they’re drug-tested and the consequence is that if you use drugs you’re gonna go back to the jail, it’s hopefully been a bad enough experience that they don’t want to go back, and they’ll keep going to therapy.”
In other words: Recidivism Bad, Rehabilitation Good…a mantra Donaghy and 10th Judicial Public Defender Richard Hughes chant in unison. Which seems a bizarre convergence in the court system, where by definition the DA and the PD are opponents—at the left and right hands of the Judge, as it were—and where at least on TV their rivalry spins on the lock ‘em up/spring ‘em axis, with no middle leanings. But though he believes in consequences, Hughes is a strong advocate that substance abuse requires a different approach; that it’s not so sheep-or-goat.
“That’s the simple catch-phrase,” Hughes says. “‘Just put ‘em in jail.’ In the abstract that’s fine, but we’re dealing with real people, that live in the community, that have families, that have children, and some of them can be helped. The key is, identifying those that can be helped…that really want help.
“The whole point of this is trying to get people back into the community so they can be productive. Go to work, take care of their family, their children, pay child support. You’ve got the trickle-down; you help the offender, you’re helping his family.
“I admire what Judge Baliles is doing [in Polk County Sessions Court.] He’s an activist judge; he’s trying to do some different things that haven’t been tried before. And that doesn’t always go over well with people…but I think that Judge Baliles strongly believes that substance abuse is the underlying problem of so many people that come through his court. He’s very determined to give them an opportunity to change their life.”
When I sit down with Judge Baliles, he tells me—in the neutral, measured tones of a doctor informing a patient that his cancer is malignant—why he thinks substance abuse is so unrelenting, and why he feels compelled to change Sessions Court’s approach to it.
“The first thing you’ve got to recognize: there’s nothing the medical profession can do for an addiction. The second thing you’ve got to do: you’ve got to understand addiction. Now, a lot of people say: ‘Well, they started, why don’t they quit?’ The answer is simple—they can’t quit. They can’t quit without help and without a system.”
And Judge Baliles, an ex-pharmacist, is at the hub of The System. He tells me he now allows qualifying offenders to enter conditional guilty pleas, thereby arming himself with a heavy hammer…jail time should they fail to complete court-ordered treatment. Such treatment may include counseling with any of forty different local pastors, AA, NA, and even intensive in-patient at Valley in Chattanooga or intensive out-patient with Dr. Linda Wells at Action Counseling in Cleveland.
But he can reward those who succeed by forbearing to enter a Judgment of Conviction against them; enormous leverage, because for some offenders the difference between checking “Yes” or “No” in the “Any Convictions?” box on a job application may very well mean the difference between a productive career and a ruined one—a fact the Judge is keenly aware of, as a man committed to breaking the cycle of addiction.
“What you’ve got to fight is that relapse,” he says. “If you don’t get these people in an AA or NA meeting following their thirty days of rehab, their outpatient rehab, what-have-you…they’ll slip back into their old ways.”
As I listen to the Judge, I notice how the study of meth in specific keeps circling back to the problem of substance abuse in general. The cob wrapped in all of this…which is worth shucking on, for a minute…is that to cops and attorneys and courts, substance abuse is very different from possession, manufacture, trafficking, or any of a dozen other drug-related violations, and isn’t connected to any single drug in particular.
Addiction is a cause of criminal activity, not a crime, and in this context methamphetamine, per se, could just as easily be cocaine or alcohol or even Galapagos Giggling Gas…just another chemical compound that’s been access-controlled through the legislative process. It’s the irrational and unhealthy lust for a compound that drives the collateral damage—case-gluts, epidemics of substance abuse, wrecked health, neglected children—and not the compound itself.
Mangle the root and the weed will soon wither…and people who get this distinction between cause and effect, between sickness and wrongdoing, are much more likely to support court-supervised treatment programs, and much more likely to support the addicts themselves as they struggle to get clean.
And what are these programs like? That's where we're headed next week.
Detectives Brian Epperson and Mike Monteith are waiting on a phone call, and when that call comes they’ll stand up and shake my hand and this jailhouse interview will be over. They’ll be driving somewhere to tape a wire to somebody’s chest, so this somebody can go to some house and buy some controlled substance from some dealer about to get his…er…something anatomical busted—which is nothing out of the ordinary for drug detectives.
“[Meth] is a dead end,” says Epperson. “If we don’t catch you, somebody is going to…whether it be a state or federal authority. A lot of people think me and Mike Monteith and the deputies of Polk County are the only ones working and watching ‘em.” He ticks off the jurisdictions that overlap here: DEA, FBI, Forest Service, TVA, TBI, State Troopers, the State Park Service, the 10th Judicial Drug Task Force, and so forth…proving there’s a stove-full of heat in Polk County, to be sure. But like street cops everywhere, he and Monteith rely mainly on The Word.
“If we don’t have the help of the people it makes things a lot harder for us,” Monteith tells me. Anything can be significant; a sharp-eyed neighbor who spots an unfamiliar car with North Carolina plates on Monday, smells an odd odor on Tuesday, and sees an unhappy kid burning a barrel of starter fluid cans on Wednesday…well, with one phone call that neighbor can do more to clean out the neighborhood than Epperson and Monteith can get done unaided in an entire year. They’ll check out such tips, do a “knock-and-talk,” maybe ask for consent to search…and put the cuffs on if there’s cause.
But then they tell me that locking a man up isn’t always about incarcerating him.
Sandra Donaghy, the Chief Assistant District Attorney for the 10th Judicial District, elaborates on this concept as she fills me in on how DAs work the cases detectives like Epperson and Monteith make. (Incidentally, Matt Dunn, the Assistant District Attorney in Charge of Rolling the Rock Back Up the Hill Every Morning, was so busy prosecuting Polk County drug cases at the time of this interview that he couldn’t spare me a few minutes to talk about them…an ironic reminder that as meth steamrollers users, the users steamroller the system—a dynamic bewailed by everyone in the legal community, even high-dollar defense lawyers, but not by anyone who peddles meth for a living.)
At any rate, the DAG’s office draws a hard line on meth manufacture and possession. The class B manufacturing charge carries a sentence of eight-to-twelve, the class C three-to-six, and DAs crack heads even for simple possession, asking for four months. And these aren’t the bulk trafficking cases, where the interests of the community are often better served by elevation to federal jurisdiction—a grim country of mandatory sentences and nary a hope of parole—no, this is how much time the 10th Judicial DAG wants mom-and-pop, Joe Eightball types to serve…in short, average Polk County users.
Jail ain’t fun. Even an addict suffering his own living hell will fear it, but sending offenders there is only half the DAG’s game plan. “If [convicts] haven’t had the benefit of any treatment within the system,” says Donaghy, “we’ve basically put them away for four months, put them right back into the community where they’re with the same friends, the same suppliers, the same everything, and we’ve just inconvenienced them for a while versus really changing their lives.
“Hopefully, that time in the jail will be the time where they can detox…and then if we put them on probation and give them supervision, where they’re drug-tested and the consequence is that if you use drugs you’re gonna go back to the jail, it’s hopefully been a bad enough experience that they don’t want to go back, and they’ll keep going to therapy.”
In other words: Recidivism Bad, Rehabilitation Good…a mantra Donaghy and 10th Judicial Public Defender Richard Hughes chant in unison. Which seems a bizarre convergence in the court system, where by definition the DA and the PD are opponents—at the left and right hands of the Judge, as it were—and where at least on TV their rivalry spins on the lock ‘em up/spring ‘em axis, with no middle leanings. But though he believes in consequences, Hughes is a strong advocate that substance abuse requires a different approach; that it’s not so sheep-or-goat.
“That’s the simple catch-phrase,” Hughes says. “‘Just put ‘em in jail.’ In the abstract that’s fine, but we’re dealing with real people, that live in the community, that have families, that have children, and some of them can be helped. The key is, identifying those that can be helped…that really want help.
“The whole point of this is trying to get people back into the community so they can be productive. Go to work, take care of their family, their children, pay child support. You’ve got the trickle-down; you help the offender, you’re helping his family.
“I admire what Judge Baliles is doing [in Polk County Sessions Court.] He’s an activist judge; he’s trying to do some different things that haven’t been tried before. And that doesn’t always go over well with people…but I think that Judge Baliles strongly believes that substance abuse is the underlying problem of so many people that come through his court. He’s very determined to give them an opportunity to change their life.”
When I sit down with Judge Baliles, he tells me—in the neutral, measured tones of a doctor informing a patient that his cancer is malignant—why he thinks substance abuse is so unrelenting, and why he feels compelled to change Sessions Court’s approach to it.
“The first thing you’ve got to recognize: there’s nothing the medical profession can do for an addiction. The second thing you’ve got to do: you’ve got to understand addiction. Now, a lot of people say: ‘Well, they started, why don’t they quit?’ The answer is simple—they can’t quit. They can’t quit without help and without a system.”
And Judge Baliles, an ex-pharmacist, is at the hub of The System. He tells me he now allows qualifying offenders to enter conditional guilty pleas, thereby arming himself with a heavy hammer…jail time should they fail to complete court-ordered treatment. Such treatment may include counseling with any of forty different local pastors, AA, NA, and even intensive in-patient at Valley in Chattanooga or intensive out-patient with Dr. Linda Wells at Action Counseling in Cleveland.
But he can reward those who succeed by forbearing to enter a Judgment of Conviction against them; enormous leverage, because for some offenders the difference between checking “Yes” or “No” in the “Any Convictions?” box on a job application may very well mean the difference between a productive career and a ruined one—a fact the Judge is keenly aware of, as a man committed to breaking the cycle of addiction.
“What you’ve got to fight is that relapse,” he says. “If you don’t get these people in an AA or NA meeting following their thirty days of rehab, their outpatient rehab, what-have-you…they’ll slip back into their old ways.”
As I listen to the Judge, I notice how the study of meth in specific keeps circling back to the problem of substance abuse in general. The cob wrapped in all of this…which is worth shucking on, for a minute…is that to cops and attorneys and courts, substance abuse is very different from possession, manufacture, trafficking, or any of a dozen other drug-related violations, and isn’t connected to any single drug in particular.
Addiction is a cause of criminal activity, not a crime, and in this context methamphetamine, per se, could just as easily be cocaine or alcohol or even Galapagos Giggling Gas…just another chemical compound that’s been access-controlled through the legislative process. It’s the irrational and unhealthy lust for a compound that drives the collateral damage—case-gluts, epidemics of substance abuse, wrecked health, neglected children—and not the compound itself.
Mangle the root and the weed will soon wither…and people who get this distinction between cause and effect, between sickness and wrongdoing, are much more likely to support court-supervised treatment programs, and much more likely to support the addicts themselves as they struggle to get clean.
And what are these programs like? That's where we're headed next week.
posted by GratefulEd | 5:59 AM
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