|
Web Posted: 01/05/2007 11:02 PM CST
Tracy Idell Hamilton
Express-News
Abel Salinas will be the first to admit he thought "cognitive restructuring" was part of some kind of namby-pamby,
soft-on-crime movement.
Then head of Bexar County Adult Probation's boot camp for young men, Salinas only reluctantly accepted a state mandate
to dismantle the harsher aspects of the camp and replace them with a program that encouraged offenders to change the way they
think.
"I thought it was a bunch of crap at first," said Salinas, who now heads the probation department's new 100-bed
substance abuse treatment facility. "But rearrest rates, recidivism and technical violations all started to go down.
I couldn't argue with that. Now we're using the best practices in what is a nationwide movement."
Cognitive restructuring gets offenders to take responsibility and change the faulty thinking that led them to substance
abuse and criminal activity. It's part of a larger group of progressive sanction practices that include better risk assessment,
reduced caseloads for probation officers, more specialized monitoring of particular groups, such as those in gangs, and treatment
for substance abuse and mental health problems.
Bexar County's new facility, which doubles the number of substance abuse beds in the county and quintuples the number
available to women, is part of a larger movement within the state to use these progressive sanctions as alternatives to jail.
All the offenders sentenced to these alternatives have something in common: a judge who believed that treatment, rather
than simple incarceration, would be worth the effort and expense.
They target people such as Manuel Gonzales, 22, who was arrested for possession of cocaine and sentenced to 90 days in
the substance abuse treatment facility. At first, he thought he'd just "relax" and ignore the program.
"But I really started getting into the counseling," he said recently. "I really started to open up."
Gonzales says he has goals he would have never developed if he'd been sentenced to "sitting around in jail."
With help from the probation department's after-care program, he hopes to get work, stay in counseling, go to school and most
important, "to stay on top of recovery."
For the first time in his young life, Gonzales says he feels hope for his future.
"This is the happiest I've been in years, even though I'm locked up," he said.
He was released the day after Christmas.
His success is hardly guaranteed. As his release day approached, Gonzales conceded he would be nervous seeing old friends
who might want to celebrate with drugs. But instead of thinking he could do it and get away with it, the way he used to, Gonzales
can now articulate the consequences of such action — getting hooked again, getting arrested, going to jail.
His new thought patterns are a result of group therapy, role playing, educational classes, and 12-step programs —
all part of the cognitive restructuring therapy process that has proven results.
The National Institute of Corrections, which provides federal, state, and local corrections agencies with training and
technical assistance, has long gathered evidence on the effectiveness of cognitive behavioral and other progressive sanction
models.
An NIC policy paper notes that in an analysis of 154 studies of treatment effectiveness, those who use progressive sanction
models reduced recidivism by 30 percent.
In Texas, according to a Texas Department of Criminal Justice report to the governor in December of 2006, probation departments
that received new money for treatment beds and reduced caseloads saw, in the first year the money was distributed, a reduction
in probation revocations ranging from 6 to 29 percent.
It's a much-welcomed trend, as Texas struggles to house and pay for its ever-growing incarcerated population.
Texas puts more of its residents, per capita, behind bars than any state save Louisiana — 691 per 100,000, according
to 2005 numbers from the Bureau of Justice Statistics. It imprisons almost the same number of people as California, despite
having 13 million fewer residents, and has the largest probation population in the country.
As county jails and state prisons burst at the seams, lawmakers have been forced to look seriously at alternatives to
building their way out of the problem. The hope is to get more nonviolent criminals into treatment programs that will break
the cycle of rearrest and incarceration that costs taxpayers millions of dollars a year.
It costs about $40 a day to house a prisoner in a county jail, compared to just $2.27 for probation, according to the
TDCJ. Specialized caseloads, residential beds and drug courts increase that cost somewhat, but it was still far cheaper than
incarceration.
Bexar County Adult Probation's new beds are part of the 2005 Legislature's $27.7 million effort to increase access to
treatment alternatives, with $13.6 million spent on new treatment beds. An accountability system was also established to monitor
the effectiveness of the new programs.
The county got $1.8 million for its new facility. The department already had 100 substance abuse beds, 60 mental health
beds and 50 beds for a former boot camp — now known as an "intermediate sanction facility," or by its
nickname, Zero Tolerance.
Like Salinas, Dr. David Abbott, director of clinical services for Bexar County Adult Probation, is a convert. The 100
new beds are a welcome addition, he says, to a department that could use "dang-near as many as we could get."
If people need to go to jail, he says, "judges will send 'em; but they're sensitive to people's needs, and if they
need treatment, we've got it."
thamilton@express-news.net
Online at: http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/metro/stories/MYSA010607.01B.changing_lives.2db9f9a.htm
|
 |
|