The establishment of the Drug Treatment Court moved one step closer to reality during the past week when a training workshop on its operations took place at the Supreme Court Building.
Among those attending were the Chief Justice of Barbados Sir Marston Gibson and Attorney General Adriel Brathwaithe.
The workshop was an important milestone on the path to dealing with some of the more persistent problems of drug abuse and drug dependency, and Yolande Forde, manager of the National Council on Substance Abuse, told participants that the workshop was important because the establishment of the court was the direction in which Barbados would like to go.
She further declared that the court was a “problem-solving court” and fell within a category similar to other specialized courts that deal with gambling, mental health or domestic violence.
She added that “in this case the specific clientele are drug-addicted offenders” and that the court, once established, would be an alternative to incarcerating people who were essentially suffering from the illness of addiction and whose criminal behaviour was being fuelled by that addiction.
Viewed from this perspective, it seems clear that some of those who appear before the courts, and who are obviously addicted to these harmful substances, might be saved from the power of the addiction and may resume useful lives of some benefit to themselves and the wider society.
It is highly desirable, therefore, that the Drug Treatment Court be established at the earliest opportunity since it will benefit those who are in the grip of the addiction and wish desperately to break that cycle!
We anticipate that there may be those who may try to beat the system and avoid a prison sentence by feigning a desire to beat the addiction; and this possibility, along with the reality that this is a new approach, makes the case for the training workshop so that court personnel and support staff can properly and sensitively carry out their functions.
Clearly, all those involved with the court will be required to exercise a new set of professional skills that will have to be sensitively exercised. Old methods will not work. Equally, we have no doubt that public perception will play an important part in the acceptance of the court as an appropriate alternative way of dealing with offenders who, hitherto, would have attracted the attention of the coercive power of the state exercised through the criminal courts.
But that coercive power will still hover over the court-ordered treatment; and indeed Miss Forde described the drug treatment court as a marriage between criminal justice and health because it is court mandated, judicially supervised treatment.
We urge all right-thinking Barbadians to follow the lead of Chief Justice Sir Marston Gibson, who said that this type of court could benefit the island because, as he was told by the Superintendent of Prisons, the walls of the prison are filling up with young men who commit property crimes under the grip of the need to satisfy their addiction.
Sir Marston declared that there needs to be a change in local culture and perceptions so that the penal system would support this kind of court. We could not agree more!
