A welcome approach from new county judge

WHAT sort of judge will Kenneth Stoner become? Time will tell, although his stated desire to bolster and expand Oklahoma’s drug courts and mental health courts is precisely the sort of approach the state needs.

Stoner, 49, of Oklahoma City, was appointed last week by Gov. Mary Fallin to serve as a district judge in Oklahoma County. He replaces former District Judge Bryan Dixon, who retired in 2017 after 31 years on the bench.

Stoner has been in private practice since 2006, focusing in the past several years on clients who suffer from addiction and mental health issues. He’s also a former prosecutor in Oklahoma County, having served on the district attorney’s domestic violence task force and later as a general felony prosecutor.

Thus, it seems clear, Stoner recognizes the need to make sure dangerous offenders pay for their crimes in prison — but also that many Oklahomans who wind up breaking the law do so because of addictions and mental health problems, and are not well served by incarceration.

In appointing Stoner, Fallin said his experience will help ensure that those who wind up in court because of offenses related to untreated mental health and substance abuse will get treatment and proper care, and that he “understands the need for nonviolent defendants to have an opportunity to reclaim their lives while adhering to treatment-compliance demands of the court.”

Here’s why drug courts and mental health courts are so important — roughly four out of every five people who enter the state’s correctional system need mental health or substance abuse treatment. While it costs about $19,000 per year to incarcerate a person (more for those with a severe mental illness), the cost is $5,000 per year for drug court and $5,400 per year for mental health court.

And these courts work. According to the state’s mental health agency, three years after graduating, only 7.9 percent of drug court participants have wound up back behind bars. Most find jobs, reunite with their children and get off the Medicaid rolls.

Oklahoma County has operated a drug court program since 1998. In a news release, Stoner said the state “is certainly moving in the right direction” with its diversion courts, but more can be done. He’d like to see public-private partnerships created, and look for ways technology can help.

Researchers in the past decade have “discovered more about the human brain and causes of our behavior than in all of history combined,” Stoner said. “In some way, our approach to addiction has been stuck in models that have not evolved with research.

“We are experiencing a watershed moment where we are beginning to embrace a paradigm shift, moving to a more effective understanding of addiction and recovery.”

He called addiction “the public health crisis of our time” and a key piece in most of the cases at the courthouse. “We can’t wait for somebody else to solve this problem for us,” he said. “We have to be responsibly creative and innovative in this area.”

We wish Stoner well and look forward to seeing what transpires in the years ahead.