Sustaining Drug Courts in Arizona and South Carolina: An Experience in Hodgepodge Budgeting*

Justice System Journal, 2004 by Douglas, James W, Hartley, Roger E

So what are drug courts in Arizona and South Carolina doing to alleviate their fiscal problems? Most are applying for additional grants. Grant opportunities are available from federal, state, and private sources. While useful in the short-term, grant monies do little to ease the long-term fiscal problems facing drug courts. Drug courts in Arizona and South Carolina are also trying to tie into benefits programs such as Medicaid to help them cover their treatment costs. This option has proven useful, particularly for juvenile and family drug courts. Unfortunately, such benefits are not available to many drug court participants.

Perhaps the most useful activity of many drug court administrators has been to lobby county and state officials. Most administrators stated that they compile data on the cost-effectiveness of their courts and present this information to elected officials at both levels of government. They claim that when confronted with the cost savings derived from treating inmates in drug court rather than locking them up, elected officials are quickly won over and become supporters of the program, at least in spirit. While producing such information is always useful, drug court administrators cannot forget that attaining funds from elected officials is a political process. Some of the administrators that have been successful at acquiring appropriated funds for their courts showed a good understanding of how important it is to build a coalition of key actors. One court administrator explained it perfectly:

We lobbied the legislature repeatedly for more money. ... It is vital to gain the support of influential people. We have made ties with the chief justice, who has lobbied on our behalf. Our circuit judges have lobbied the legislature. I put together numbers to show the program's effectiveness and how much money will be saved by doing drug courts. Those numbers are important to show, but they do not have an impact on budget decisions in the legislature. It is far more effective to have a judge, who was elected by the legislature and may actually have been a legislator, to use his personal relationships to influence members of the legislature. Lobbying is a personal thing. If they know and respect you then they will listen if you say a program is needed.

Another drug court was lucky enough to have the probate judge as a supporter. This court was on the road to shutting down because its grant ran out and it failed to get another one it had applied for. Fortunately for the court, the state legislature had just increased a number of court fees. The probate judge lobbied the county council to appropriate an increase in the probate fee to finance the drug court, thus saving the court and gaining it a stable source of funding. The success of strategies such as these may determine the long-term sustainability of drug courts in Arizona and South Carolina.

CONCLUSION

We find that drug courts, almost from their inception, are forced to operate hodgepodge budgets, where ingenuity (i.e., establishing themselves as nonprofit entities), opportunism (i.e., lobbying), and luck (i.e., the legislature coincidentally raising probate court fees in time to save a drug court) are likely to separate drug courts that succeed from those that fail. This hodgepodge budgeting system constrains drug courts by creating uncertainty and forcing court administrators to appease multiple masters, each of whom may have different goals and interests. It is possible that these hodgepodge budgeting systems will reduce drug courts' long-term effectiveness by limiting their ability to finance sufficiently large caseloads. In fact, we found courts struggling to maintain caseloads averaging twenty-eight cases per court. This is woefully inadequate to claim success for the drug court movement given that Charleston County, South Carolina, alone had approximately 4,000 drug cases in 2001.