A MONEY-SAVING ITEM

As the Legislature tries to fit spending into a tight budget, one small item offers an opportunity for net savings rather than long-term outlays. The issue is restoration of a $150,000 appropriation for the Hancock County drug court.

The Appropriations and Financial Affairs Committee has 18 items on its crowded agenda for a hearing today. When number 17 comes up, Dick Dimond, the retired physician who started the program with mostly private funds, will have just three minutes to make his persuasive case.

The case: The Hancock County Deferred Sentencing Project, acting as a drug court, diverts selected drug-addicted defendants from the overcrowded prison system into a strictly monitored outpatient treatment and rehabilitation program for at least one year. By figuring the costs of incarceration, Dr. Dimond calculates that the program saved the state a net of $269,000 as of May 2007.

The project began in 2005 with a federal grant and a contribution from the Stephen and Tabitha King Foundation and the donated services of a retired justice of the Maine Supreme Judicial Court. It worked so well that the Legislature last year added $150,000 to the budget of the Office of Substance Abuse to finance it starting July 1, 2008, as Maine’s sixth adult drug court. But, in efforts to close the deficit, Gov. John Baldacci’s supplemental budget eliminated that funding. It should be restored.

Here is how the Hancock Country project has performed as of Dec. 31: It took on 31 clients, nonviolent defendants who have pleaded guilty and accepted the supervised program as an alternative to jail, knowing that if they fail the jail sentence will take effect. Of those 31, only four had dropped out of the program or been expelled. Eleven had “graduated” and had jobs or were enrolled in school full time. The rest were still in the program. None had been arrested for a new crime.

Substance abuse is an epidemic afflicting the whole state. Drug- and alcohol-related crimes outnumber all other offenses combined. Drug overdose deaths outnumber motor vehicle fatalities. The economic cost of substance abuse in Maine is estimated at $618 million to $1.2 billion, or 10 to 20 percent of the state’s General Fund expenditures. Maine’s prisons and county jails face a worsening crisis of overcrowding.

The arithmetic should be convincing: spending $150,000 to continue saving $269,000 above and beyond that appropriation, while restoring addicts to a useful life, cutting back crime and reducing the jail population.