Facing a statewide heroin and opioid epidemic, Ohio’s courts continue to lock up hundreds of nonviolent, drug-addicted offenders each year that could more effectively be treated in the community — for a lot less money.
It happens because many judges don’t have sufficient treatment resources in their counties. It also happens because some judges, especially in rural counties, don’t understand addiction. Whether addicts and minor drug offenders go to prison depends a lot on where they live.
“Some people, including judges and prosecutors, see addiction as a state in which people have more control than they have,” Orman Hall, director of the Governor’s Opiate Action Team, told me. “Opioid and heroin addiction is a compulsive disorder. In the early stages, people have very little ability to not relapse.”
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From 2000 to 2013, the share of inmates entering Ohio prisons for crimes directly tied to heroin or opioid use — including possession and petty theft — rose more than 400 percent, from 1.6 percent of admissions to 8.3 percent. Now, roughly 1,700 people a year enter Ohio prisons for such offenses, costing the state nearly $45 million a year.
At a symposium on addiction this summer in Columbus, Gary Mohr, director of the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction, noted that building and running one prison for 20 years costs $1 billion. That money, he said, would be better spent on treating nonviolent drug offenders in the community.
“You will do a better job than I will do in turning their lives around,” he told hundreds of community drug treatment providers.
Despite the statements of top state officials, Ohio continues to incarcerate instead of treat addiction. This is a story of two addicts in two neighboring counties, and two very different systems of justice.
Path to prison
Meet Kaylee Marie Morrison, Ohio prisoner No. W090131. On July 31, Judge William Hart of Hardin County sentenced Morrison, 28, of Kenton to four years in prison. Morrison has been convicted of theft, drug possession, and tampering with evidence.
In Hardin County, her real crime is that she’s a heroin addict.
In jail, Morrison relapsed in July after eight months of clean time. Her bunkie had smuggled in $20,000 worth of cocaine and heroin. Morrison held out for nearly two weeks, watching her cell mates get twisted every night. Then she gave in.
“It's not an excuse, but I just felt like I had no hope,” she told me during an interview at the Ohio Reformatory for Women in Marysville.
In sentencing her to prison, Judge Hart said Morrison had been given enough chances. In prison, he told her at the sentencing hearing, she could think about how to just say no.
Morrison’s struggle to say no to opioids and heroin raged for six years. During that time, she spent more than 700 days locked up. If incarceration fixed addiction, Morrison would be straight.
Like most of those caught up in this epidemic, Kaylee is young and white. She grew up in Kenton — population, 8,300.
The daughter of a university administrator and a registered nurse, Morrison had an upper-middle-class upbringing. Her parents divorced in 1998, when Morrison was 12. She has a younger brother and sister.
“We went on family vacations every summer,” Morrison said. “Everything was pretty much handed to me.”
Still, Morrison was troubled. She was diagnosed as bipolar this year and has always suffered bouts of depression and anxiety. She was a poor student but graduated from Kenton High School in 2004. Later, she attended cosmetology school and worked as a nursing assistant, waitress, and salesman.
In 2008, Morrison’s boyfriend introduced her to Percocet, a highly addictive prescription painkiller. The pills rocked her world. The energy and euphoria they gave her made everything right.
As her tolerance for the drug grew, however, Morrison needed more and more pills just to feel normal and avoid the agony of withdrawal.
“It got to the point where I couldn’t even get out of bed without a pill,” she said. “Until I had my fix, I couldn’t do anything.”
Morrison was taking 20 Percocets a day, usually 5 or 10 milligrams each. She bought them off the street for $6 or $12 a pill. A year after she started taking pills, Morrison switched to heroin, at first snorting the drug and later shooting it.
“Everyone was saying, ‘Why don’t you just do heroin? It’s so much cheaper,’ ” she told me. “Heroin became my priority.”
Morrison was using 2 grams of heroin a day, spending $300 to $400 a day to feed her addiction. She got some of the money by stealing and lying to her parents.
Over the next five years, she quit using and relapsed three times. “You convince yourself that you can do it just one more time,” she said. “But you can’t.”
In jail and prison, Morrison has gained 30 pounds. She doesn’t look like the smiling, radiant young woman who appears in earlier photographs.
There are many people in prison who shouldn’t be. Morrison is one of them. Before her last relapse — when drugs dangled in front of her for days — she had responded well to treatment. Now she can only hope for an early judicial release. Still, she’s determined to move forward and take whatever help the prison offers, including education and drug treatment.
After her release, Morrison plans to go to New Beginnings, a Christian recovery center in Piketon, Ohio. At a court hearing in June, the center agreed to take her, without charge, for treatment.
“I’m sick and tired,” Morrison told me. “I’m going to take this time to work on me. It’s going to be a lifetime battle.”
Less than 30 miles from Kenton, in neighboring Marion County, Common Pleas Court Judge Jim Slagle holds drug court every Monday in an unassuming wood-paneled courtroom. A former prosecutor, Judge Slagle started the specialized docket last year, shortly after taking office. Nationwide, studies over the last 20 years show that drug courts reduce recidivism and crime and serve as cost-effective alternatives to incarceration.
Drug court is about meeting people where they are. On the day I visited, Judge Slagle fist-bumped a client who had just completed another month of sobriety. Most of the 12 people in court appeared in their 20s. Some wore shorts, baseball caps, or T-shirts. Judge Slagle monitors more than 30 offenders, almost all of them addicted to heroin. If they weren’t in drug court, they would be in prison.
Typically, drug court lasts 18 months. Marion County won’t graduate its first offender until late this year.
It’s no walk in the park. Participants must report regularly to the judge and probation officer. They call in — sometimes daily — for drug testing, participate in therapy and 12 Step programs, and work or look for employment.
Missteps, such as missing a call-in or even a relapse, are allowed. It’s part of recovery. But serious mistakes, such as disappearing for a few days, trigger sanctions, including jail time. The idea is to correct wayward behavior immediately, with shorter sanctions, and keep people on the path to recovery.
“Doing this takes a lot of energy,” Judge Slagle told me.
“It’s a lot easier to say, just go to prison. There are a lot of incentives and pressures to do that.”
His probation officers are not only cops but also counselors and mentors. They push people to succeed. Drug court officer Nate George was just named Officer of the Year by the Ohio Chief Probation Officers Association. In prison, Mr. George told me, the people he sees would just “make better connections and come out worse than they were.”
Chief Probation Officer Jennifer Miller said she’d rather “help people become productive members of society” than lock them up, “only to return and repeat a vicious cycle.”
It’s tough but rewarding work. Marion County’s drug court targets the people least likely to succeed — people like Clayton Wood, 29, of Marion.
He spent most of the last 12 years on probation or locked up, including a one-year bit in prison in 2007 for drug trafficking. On the street, Wood was using two to three grams of heroin a day, spending $400 a day or more to get it.
It’s a familiar story. After graduating from high school in 2003, Wood found construction work. He started popping pills — Vicodin, Percocet, and OxyContin — to ease the physical stress of hard labor. When he was 25, Wood graduated to heroin. He’s been in treatment three times. Nothing worked.
With 10 felonies, including drug trafficking, possession, and receiving stolen property, he could have gone straight to prison last spring when, on probation for another drug possession charge, he relapsed on heroin.
Wood turned himself in, anyway. He spent a month in jail, including a harrowing 10 days coming off heroin, sweating, vomiting, shivering, and aching so hard he thought his bones would break.
“I was at rock bottom,’’ he told me. “I was ready to give up on everything.”
But Judge Slagle wasn’t ready to give up on him. In April, he placed Wood in drug court. Wood hasn’t used since.
Wood works full-time in building maintenance, meets with Judge Slagle weekly, goes to Narcotics Anonymous meetings daily, attends group therapy twice a week, checks in with his probation officer three times a week, and gets drug tested regularly.
To help ease his cravings for heroin, he gets a monthly Vivitrol shot. More than half of the people in Marion County’s drug court participate in some kind of medication-assisted treatment. “It’s been a miracle shot for me,” Wood said.
“It takes away the triggers, but you still have to do the work.”
Wood avoids old friends and familiar spots that could spark a relapse, including McDonald’s, where he used to shoot dope in the men’s room. “A Value Meal just isn’t that important to me,” he said.
Drug court has even changed Wood’s attitude toward cops.
“The probation officers here really care about you,” he told me. “They just want to see us do better. If they would have locked me up, I would have just been mad at the system and wouldn’t have taken responsibility.”
A former high school baseball star, Wood started coaching Little League this year. He loves working with kids and plans to speak in juvenile facilities. His first child is due in March.
“That’s like an insurance policy for me,” he said. “I’ve wasted 12 years of my life. I’m not going back. I just take it one day at a time and keep doing the right things.”
Across Ohio, there are hundreds of stories like Wood’s. Sadly, there are thousands like Morrison’s.
To flip the script, Ohio must divert more of the money it spends on prisons to effective community-based treatment. Judges who continue to criminalize addiction need to educate themselves or find another job.
No solution is perfect. Opioid addicts may relapse seven or eight times, or more. But the alternative is much worse: continuing to send people — at a cost of $25,000 a year each — into Ohio’s crowded prisons, where their disease won’t get better and may get worse.
Like 200,000 Ohioans struggling with opioid and heroin addiction, politicians and policy makers have a choice: They can keep making the same costly and destructive mistakes or, like Ohio’s prison chief, find the courage, will, and wisdom to go a better way.
Jeff Gerritt is The Blade’s deputy editorial page editor.
Contact him at:jgerritt@theblade.com,419-724-6467, or onTwitter @jeffgerritt.
First Published September 7, 2014, 4:00 a.m.
