Pilot program puts emphasis on treatment
Harm Reduction Diversion Program gives individuals more opportunities
In the first six months of the Harm Reduction Diversion Program pilot, the Health and Human Services Agency was referred 323 individual names by the Yolo County District Attorney’s Office.
The pilot program began on Jan. 1 in an attempt to divert individuals arrested for low-level drug possession and public intoxication offenses out of the criminal justice system.
“We are doing this to test the hypothesis that addicted individuals do not belong in the criminal justice system and that results will improve through a pure treatment approach,” Yolo County District Attorney Jeff Reisig told the Board of Supervisors last week.
The Harm Reduction Diversion Program gives participants two opportunities, or essentially two cases, in the course of a 12-month period to voluntarily engage in treatment with the Health and Human Services Agency (HHSA).
Instead of filing a criminal case, the individual is referred to HHSA. However, on the third offense within that 12-month period, a criminal case is filed.
“There continues to be a really high stigma around substance use, more so even than mental health conditions,” said Karen Larsen, director of HHSA. “That stigma is exacerbated when the criminal justice system is involved. People have a sense of fear and shame.”
The program is also aiming to reduce the strain on the DA’s Office, courts and police officers and address the racial and class disparities within the current system.
“We certainly have seen in the data that people of color are particularly disproportionately contacted and cited for these types of offences when compared to their census data in Yolo County,” Reisig emphasized.
Over the last several years, criminal consequences for drug possession and use offenses have consistently decreased largely due to the implementation of Propositions 36 and 47, which both decriminalized those offenses and took away incentive that people may have had to engage in court di
rected treatment programs, Reisig explained.
Prop. 36 changed state law to allow defendants convicted of nonviolent drug possession the opportunity to receive a probationary sentence in lieu of incarceration. Prop. 47, otherwise known as The Safe Neighborhood and Schools Act, reclassified certain theft and drug possession offenses from felonies to misdemeanors.
Since 2014, which was when Prop. 47 was enacted, drug court participation has decreased by 86% in Yolo courts.
“The incentive for people who were arrested on drug possession offenses to participate in a drug supervised treatment program has simply eroded,” Reisig emphasized.
Of the 792 drug-related cases filed by the DA in 2019, 316 are still pending for failure to appear in court. Only 56 resulted in a conviction and 17 of the convicted received jail time. Twenty-nine or 3.6% accepted court-supervised drug diversion.
According to Reisig, the average amount of jail time for those cases was 27 days. He said most of these cases will receive little to no jail time at all.
From January to June 2021, 48 individuals contacted the access line for screening or were already in treatment. Thirty-five ended up in treatment or continued their treatments. This equates to 10.8% of the 323 individuals that were referred to HHSA.
“You’re talking about 90% that currently don’t end up in treatment,” Reisig said. “They basically are in the wind. I don’t love these numbers right now, but Karen and I have a good collaboration and a lot of success in other projects.”
Larsen said practices like open doors and letter referrals need to be replaced in order to encourage more people to stay in treatment. Peer advocates, help with direct transportation to treatment and warm hand-offs have all proven to improve retention rates.
Warm hand-offs are when the clients meet faceto-face with another person who will then introduce them to their treatment provider.
The pilot program is set to continue until the end of the year to allow staff to collect more data and gauge if the program has been successful.
“What I’m going to attempt to measure by the end of the year is the recidivism rates for those people who have been referred over,” Reisig concluded. “So I can get a better idea of what’s happening to these folks that have been passed off to HHSA and are they continuing to commit crime in the community while they are receiving the benefit of this Harm Reduction Diversion.”