'Messy' cases wanted in Mental Health Court

COEUR d’ALENE — Stacee Hoppe’s aha moment came when she was in jail.

The mother of two had spent 42 days behind bars on drug charges.

She’d been drying out, throwing up and hallucinating. Hoppe was haunted in isolation away from the regular prison population as she sobered up and considered what a mess drug addiction had made of her life.

Then she got a visitor.

The county’s mental health court coordinator came for a talk. She asked Hoppe if she wanted to change her life, or just get out of jail.

“I remember just crying,” Hoppe said. “I wanted to be with my family. I didn’t want this anymore. I wanted to change my life.”

Hoppe, who was addicted to prescription drugs, would make a change, but she would still serve a stint in prison — while she was 5 months pregnant — before transitioning into a life without drugs.

And today? Hoppe is on staff at Kootenai County’s Mental Health Court.

She’s one of two women to kick addictions and become counselors to the many who haven’t, but need the help of people like Hoppe.

Staff member Brandi Irons works alongside Hoppe. Both women are paid by the Department of Health and Welfare.

Irons’ is a story of heroin addiction and drug dealing to support her habit. Her drug use began as a teenager when she smoked marijuana and binged on alcohol while in high school. She was prescribed opiate-based painkillers after an injury, and her addiction folded into a heroin habit after she graduated.

The Coeur d’Alene native was 21 when she was arrested for five felonies including manufacturing, delivery, several counts of possession and a DUI.

She had been dealing prescription pills to pay for heroin.

“I had multiple life sentences hanging over me,” said the mother of two.

The notion of spending her life behind bars hadn’t bored into her subconscious and prevented her from continuing to use and sell drugs.

“I didn’t take life seriously,” she said.

The first time she stood before a First District judge, she was granted a term of probation and tried to quit using.

“I was clean for 30 days and then I relapsed,” she said.

The probation violation brought her one step closer to what would become her destiny.

The same judge sent her on a rider — a prison rehabilitation program — where she earned exceptional marks. She returned to First District Court with the kind of report card that guaranteed her another chance at probation.

“This time I made it a little bit longer,” she said.

She was pregnant when she relapsed a few months later. She realized her heroin use would doom her to a life in prison. If that happened, she knew her child would likely grow up in foster care. She turned herself in to her probation officer and confessed her continual drug use.

“I told my probation officer I was pregnant, addicted to heroin and I don’t know what to do,” she said.

She once again stood before the same judge. There were no programs available. She had sold drugs too many times to too many people in a seemingly endless stream of relapse and defeat. She’d been given opportunities, an inordinate amount of support and rehabilitation, and she had crashed. Again and again.

The judge had run out of options, he said.

That’s when Mary Wolfinger stepped in.

MARY TO THE RESCUE

Wolfinger is a former probation officer and founding member of Kootenai County’s mental health court program. As the court’s coordinator, she seeks out candidates for the 18-month sobriety program from among the plethora of convicts and addicts who daily make their way through the local judicial system.

She doesn’t choose just anyone.

“They have to have severe or persistent mental illness,” Wolfinger said.

It is often the result of drug addiction.

“They must need a higher level of care,” Wolfinger said.

Many are hard cases. They’re the people whose addiction has left them with nowhere to turn. They have relapsed and stumbled and fallen, and likely won’t regain their feet without help.

They must want to change.

“Our whole goal is to change their behavior,” Wolfinger said. “What are the obstacles they are faced with, and how can we convert that behavior?”

Since its inception 15 years ago as an Idaho anomaly — Kootenai County was the first county in the state to adopt a drug court in 1998, and one of the first to adopt a mental health court six years later — the court that bumps along on a budget of $9,600 annually has graduated hundreds of individuals.

Its slew of workers including probation officers, administrators, mentors, counselors and judges are volunteers who work off a small stipend that covers basic administration costs. They aren’t paid for the hours they devote to the court’s participants to get them back on the straight and narrow.

Their reward is seeing the life changes, receiving the thanks from family members, knowing they are making a difference in the futures of people whose future, months earlier, was nonexistent.

THE COURT’S CREATOR

District Judge John Mitchell had been a judge for just two years in 2004 when he patched together a court model from southern Idaho, turning it into a local mental health court.

“Idaho Falls was starting one, so we went down to look at theirs,” Mitchell said. “We tried to replicate it.”

There were challenges. North Idaho didn’t have the state support that was available in southern Idaho, which meant a system of volunteers had to be established. A creative payment plan for patient treatment was adopted. Mitchell and volunteers like Wolfinger forged ahead.

“We had five participants,” Mitchell said.

It didn’t deter him. The program now boasts 42 individuals.

The court meets each Thursday morning in Courtroom 8 of the Justice Building on Garden Avenue.

If the noise from the hallway is any indication, what happens inside the courtroom beginning at 8 a.m. is a celebration.

Clapping and voices rise in unison as if on cue.

But it is not all fun and games.

The courtroom setting may be less dignified — and without the formal protocol of a regular proceeding — but the results are similarly acute.

In addition to attending the weekly court hearings, participants are counseled, taught life skills, meet regularly with their probation officers and undergo regular drug and alcohol screening. Each participant is part of a team. Their daily behavior is scrutinized to the minutiae.

A belligerent attitude can result in jail time, used as a sanction for not following rules. Relapse, missing meetings or lying can also earn participants a stint behind bars before they return to the program.

Participants one at a time give weekly reports to the judge and their peers at the morning gatherings. They are congratulated, hence the clapping, for their progress; they are reprimanded or sanctioned for their failures.

“We have a lot of patience with them,” Mitchell said.

CAUSE AND EFFECT

Most of the participants have been hooked up for doing drugs, but for many there is an underlying current of discontent, mental illness, sexual abuse, low self esteem and destructive behavior.

“Most of it is drug offenses,” Mitchell said.

Theft, enhanced charges and larceny are part of the picture.

“In all likelihood to feed their drug addiction,” Mitchell said.

Staff members dig deeper. They try to uncover the root of what ails participants.

“Almost all of it is trauma that has never been dealt with,” Wolfinger said. “They are using illegal substances to feel better.”

At a recent Thursday morning meeting, a woman with long hair, shackled and wearing a yellow jumpsuit, stood in front of the judge’s bench, where a robed District Judge Cynthia K.C. Meyer — sitting in for Mitchell — greeted her as the audience, participants and staff members listened.

The woman, in her late 20s or early 30s, had absconded from the program and her treatment regime.

It is not an unusual story.

“You put yourself at risk,” Meyer said.

What happened?

“This guy came up and started talking to me,” the woman said. “He ended up stealing my wallet and stuff.”

The man took her for a ride. There were drugs. There was a motel room.

“I didn’t know where to go, when they were driving me around,” the woman said.

Did you feel like you were being held against your will? A probation officer asks.

“Well, yeah, kind of,” the woman offers.

Another woman, this one taller and wearing an orange jump suit, was reported to be associating with people not approved by the team.

Because her hands were shackled to her waist, she bent her body to brush the hair from her eyes.

“You have another shot at this, to make this work,” the judge said.

PROGRAM WINS (and losses)

Although the program requires 18 months to complete, the regime, the stringent rules and the constant supervision can strain even the most placid participants. As they tilt into the tepid waters of rule breaking and the sanctions that sometimes require starting over, or which make participants lose ground, their graduation date is pushed further into the future.

“Most people complete it in two years,” Wolfinger said.

What then?

The program isn’t a one-stop shop to a new life, Mitchell said.

There are no guarantees.

The success rate of the program is around 65 percent.

“That means 35 percent have a new crime within three years of graduating,” Mitchell said. “But 65 percent don’t, and that’s pretty significant.”

Both Wolfinger and Mitchell reiterate that participants must be hard cases to be accepted.

“We want the messy ones,” Mitchell said. “It’s kind of counter intuitive to take people with tougher problems.”

Wolfinger said the caliber of participants makes the job harder.

“But it’s these people we want to be serving,” she said.

Hoppe and Irons may not have considered themselves hard cases. But without mental health court, their journeys might have dropped into the deep end of a pool that others — their friends and neighbors — couldn’t fathom.

“It gave me hope for a better way of living,” Irons said. “The hope that I could recover.”

The same opportunity is afforded to every participant, she said.

For Hoppe the program was equally life changing. She received, and now she gives.

“We teach them the skills to live a healthy life,” Hoppe said.

Many of the participants have not experienced a normal life, Irons said.

“They have the opportunity to change generations of alcohol abuse and addiction,” she said. “It’s a hopeful program.”