Colston: Drug court is major feat at end of career
She says rehabilitation is the key to long-term success.
Retiring Floyd Superior Court Judge Tambra Colston believes the creation of a drug court in Floyd County is the best thing she has been involved with in her long judicial career. Judge Colston hammered home the point to Rome Rotary Club members Thursday that the only way to effectively deal with drug offenders is to rehabilitate them.
Colston told the civic group 80 percent of what the court handles are criminal matters and that 90 percent of the criminal cases stem from a drug problem. “It’s ridiculous,” Colston said. She said 80 percent of the drug offenders are “good people with a bad problem.”
Defense counselor Robert Rutledge, who sits on a Citizens Advisory panel for the drug court, said the court is actually helping people and not perpetuating the problem. “It’s less of a moral or criminal problem and more of a health problem,” Rutledge said.
The judge recalled a speech she made to Rotary 18 years ago when she was the Rome Judicial Circuit District Attorney. “You cannot change a drug addict with the lock ‘em up mentality, the mentality of the uninformed, I call it. I just didn’t know what to do back then,” Colston said. “There’s not a person who would ever choose to live like that if they could just stop.
Becoming sober by circumstance, being in jail for any number of years, does not equate to recovery, according to Colston. She explained that she has always encouraged families of drug offenders to get their loved one into rehabilitation after their release from prison.
“Now we have a program,” Colston said.
The program includes treatment from trained providers. Offenders have to attend meetings four times a week and are drug tested constantly and randomly, surveillance officers check on them any time of day or night, they have curfews and have to come to court to report to Judge Colston once a week. “They’re going to screw up, we know that, but they’re going to be sanctioned and they will be put back on path,” Colston said. “That’s a different way of dealing with this that’s never been done before.”
Judge Colston is retiring at the end of the year and told the civic leaders the best gift she could receive from the community would be to “see this program thrive, now, and into the future.”