Our guest: Jose D. Salinas Judge at Marion Superior Court
In this episode we sit down with Judge Jose Salinas of the Marion Superior Court to delve into the world of drug courts. Judge Salinas shares his insights on how drug courts operate, from the initial entry criteria to the rigorous requirements for graduation. We discuss the structured yet supportive environment these courts provide to help individuals overcome addiction and reintegrate into society.
Judge Salinas explains the comprehensive process participants undergo, emphasizing the collaboration between the judiciary, probation officers, treatment providers, and community resources. We explore the critical factors considered for someone to be admitted into the program and the stringent but supportive measures in place to ensure participants stay on track. Throughout our conversation, we evaluate the effectiveness of drug courts. Judge Salinas provides compelling evidence of their success, highlighting personal stories of transformation. He also addresses common misconceptions and the challenges faced by these specialized courts. Tune in to gain a deeper understanding of how drug courts are making a significant impact in the justice system, offering a path to recovery and hope for many individuals battling substance use disorder.
Transcript:
Terri
Welcome, everybody, to divergent insights. My guest today is Judge Jose Salinas. He is a judge at Marion Superior Court indiana. I want to thank you so much, Judge Salinas, for your time and welcome you to the podcast.
Judge Salinas
It’s my pleasure. Thank you so much for the invitation.
Terri
Absolutely. We’re going to talk about what you are seeing in your courts, specifically with those with a substance abuse disorder and how you are utilizing drug courts successfully. So let’s start first with having you tell us a little bit about your career and the path that you took that brought you to superior court.
Judge Salinas
Okay. Well, I’m originally from South Texas, and we used to come in the summers to come work in the midwest. So have a lot of family in the midwest. We stayed here over time, graduated from Indiana University Law school in 1997. I hung up my shingle here indianapolis, which is the capital of Indiana, right in the center of the state. And I was lawyered for about ten years, got elected the first time in 2006, reelected in 2012, again in 18. I’m up again this year. So I’ve been on the bench going on 17 and a half years. So ten years as a lawyer and 17 plus as a judicial officer.
Judge Salinas
And I’ve been in all that time, all but about the first four months, I have been the presiding judge for the Marion County Superior Court 23 and the Marion county drug treatment court, as well as the Marion county reentry court. Those are two separate problem solving courts that we operate here in Marion county.
Terri
Okay, great. Yeah. So for everybody voting out there, he’s got a lot of experience in this particular arena.
Judge Salinas
We’re on a retention vote, so I’m not advocating for that.
Terri
Okay.
Judge Salinas
All right.
Terri
Scratch that.
Judge Salinas
But, you know, if you vote yes, great. If not, well, that’s fine.
Terri
Okay. Sounds good. All right. So what types of cases do you see in your courtroom? Do you have an estimate of how many people that come through have some sort of substance use disorder?
Judge Salinas
Well, in my courtroom, and see, let me explain for our listeners here, the problem solving court is a different dynamics than what you see like on tv, like in law and order. We call that kind of court like what you see in tv, our adversarial court. That’s when you have the lawyers going in and yelling, objection, overruled. Things of that nature. The problem solving court’s a little bit different animal. It’s a little bit more at ease. We still follow the rules of evidence, but they’re more lax because we want to get to the heart of the issue. So as far as the problem solving court, the drug treatment court, everyone in our program has to have a link and or a substance abuse issue that is the nexus to get into our program.
Judge Salinas
Now, in the adversarial court, which we handle, duis, batteries, drug charges, I would say more than half of the cases that we see have either a direct connection to substance abuse or drugs such as duis or possession of marijuana or some other substance, or it’s either a theft and they’re stealing to fund their habit. You know what I mean? So on the adversarial side, and this is all my own numbers, but from what I see in my court, on the adversarial side, I would say about 60% of the clients that we see have some kind of nexus to substance abuse in some way. On the drug treatment side, which is our problem solving court, 100% of those clients have a nexus or an issue with the substance abuse because they have to be allowed into our program. And our program is.
Judge Salinas
There’s two unique facets to it. One, it’s pre plea, which means if you’re admitted into the program and you graduate our program, your case gets dismissed by the prosecutor, which we’re very proud about that. And the second aspect is it’s strictly, you have to volunteer to be in the program. You have to want to be in the program. You’re not assigned to it, you’re not ordered to it by a judge. And that’s unique, because our requirements in our program are ten times harder than what you would get in the adversarial court if you were to be sentenced to, say, a regular probation docket. The requirements that we have, and I’ll be happy to explain those during the course of our conversation, are a lot harder. We have more requirements from our clients.
Terri
Okay. Yeah, let’s definitely talk about that. So just for my clarification, then, is drug court synonymous with problem solving court?
Judge Salinas
Yes. Problem solving court is the whole umbrella. Under that, you have reentry court, which is people coming out of DLC. We have drug treatment courts like mine. You have DUI courts. You have family based courts as well. So there’s various problem solving courts, but they all have a couple of unique features that are different than the adversarial court that you normally would see on tv. And it’s those unique features that may. That stand out when you come see our court.
Terri
Okay. And does anyone with going through adversarial court ever end up in drug court or that’s completely separate?
Judge Salinas
They. Well, they do, because once you go first thing, once you get arrested, you get charged with whatever charge you end up with, then your lawyer will look at the case. If they feel that you are a better candidate for drug treatment court, then they can apply for you to be in our program. Now, we have some aspects of that I’m not really happy with. Which means, by that, I mean, most attorneys don’t apply for our court until they’re eight or nine months on down the process because they want to explore all the avenues, evidential avenues that the case may have. We always feel that if you’re an addict, the sooner you get into our program, the better.
Judge Salinas
But even eight or nine months on down the process, if you’re an addict, you’re still an addict when you come into our program, that’s not going to change because it’s hard to overcome that addiction. So why we would like to get clients, and we call them clients. We don’t call them defendants in the problem solving court arena. We would like to get our clients within the first 90 days. That would be ideal. Very rarely does that happen. Normally we get them within eight or nine months on down the process.
Terri
Okay. Okay. All right. So you allowed me to sit in on the drug court so I could see how it works, which obviously, you see, I still have some questions, even after doing that.
Judge Salinas
It’s a different animal. Oh, my God.
Terri
Yeah, it really is. And I just want to share with the listeners some of the things that I observed. So first, there’s. And jump in anytime if I’m, you know, not saying something correctly or misrepresenting. But first, there was a morning session, and the client was not present for that.
Judge Salinas
That is called staffing. That is when one of the same players are in both adversarial and the problem solving Cort arena, which means we have a judicial officer, we have a defense attorney and the prosecutor. What is different in the problem solving Cort arena? We also have case managers that are in our meeting. We call it sapping, and we also have the treatment providers as well. So that morning session, it was strictly off the record. It was not on the record. It’s a meeting that we do virtually now. We used to do it in my office before the pandemic. Now with the pandemic that we all were all more used to virtual. Yeah, the virtual meetings. We do it virtually now, but in that meeting is the prosecutor, defense attorney, the case managers, and the treatment providers.
Judge Salinas
What we do in that meeting is discuss how our clients have done the last seven days or since their last court session.
Terri
Okay. Yeah. And you also, I think had drug lab there. Right.
Judge Salinas
Because many times there’s always nuances to whether something can become positive or not, whether it could be a false positive. And I’m always amazed as to the new types either of questions that come up in terms of could that cause a false positive?
Terri
Yeah.
Judge Salinas
And I’m also amazed at the way clients sometimes try to deviate from giving us a valid sample.
Terri
Yeah. Yeah. There was an interesting one the day that I was there. I believe it was ibuprofen. They were attributing something to ibuprofen, and you asked for whatever that next step is with the lab.
Judge Salinas
Yeah, we do a confirmation. If they’re disputing that it is an accurate positive results, they can ask for a confirmation, and that is their right within our program. Over the time, I’ve come to realize that if it’s about 50, 50 times, it is. No, hang on. Rephrase that. But one out of every ten times, it comes back a false positive in the client’s favor. The rest is usually a reason why. And I’m always tell the defense attorney, it’d be nice if the clients were to at least let us know, because the only way we’re going to be able to help them effectively is to let us know what’s going on in their lives. Because the first thing we do when we have a positive is. Or is we ask them to look at their day.
Judge Salinas
What if they do differently if they’re saying it’s a false positive? Did you eat something out of the ordinary? Did you take some medication that you weren’t supposed to? That’s what we always tell our clients. Look at what you’re putting in your body. We have a list that we give our clients when they enter into our program of the medication that they cannot take. And all this is over the counter stuff because the ones that are prescribed, those are things that for sure you can’t take unless the doctor says it is medically necessary for this patient to take this, this drug in order to maintain the health that the doctor would want.
Terri
Okay. Have you had anyone use that list to then try to game the system and say, oops, oh, all the time?
Judge Salinas
Well, we always. Because there are always new things. I think the big one now is vaping. You know, I didn’t know. I mean, because it’s weird. In Indiana, we allow hemp, okay, to be in products, but we don’t allow marijuana, so illegal. So they say a very small percentage of marijuana is in vaping products. We do have a cutoff limit as far as if you’re over a product, over a certain limit, then we consider it to be actual marijuana use. And so the debate is, and listen, I understand it from my clients. Our clients will say, if it’s not, if it’s against the rules, why is it legal? You know, if hemp is going to cause a false positive for marijuana, why is it allowed indiana? And, and sometimes I don’t have a good answer.
Judge Salinas
And another geographical dilemma that we face indiana is every state around us in the Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky, they allow marijuana in some form or fashion, either medical marijuana or just outright, you know, marijuana. And so, you know, we have that to overcome in our process. And so we’ve, we have evolved over time. Just to say it on the marijuana front, I firmly believe that it is a gateway drug. But I will have ten people, experts tell me that it’s not. Okay.
Terri
Yeah.
Judge Salinas
My belief is grounded in what I’ve seen since 1991, when I started as a probation officer, because I do believe that you will eventually get tired of that high and you’re going to switch to something else. But experts tell me that it is not a gateway drug. But we all have a right to have our own opinion about these things.
Terri
Well, I mean, if you have a substance use disorder, it’s just plain and simple. Not a good idea to be using marijuana. That’s a substance. I mean, that can create a problem.
Judge Salinas
So what we’re fighting now is a vaping. The other things we’re fighting that are what our clients can buy in stores, these designer drugs that are, and even the state statutes are having a hard time keeping up with them because you change one chemical compound, all of a sudden it’s no longer illegal. It’s legal.
Terri
Right?
Judge Salinas
So it’s.
Terri
But for their treatment program, they’re still chasing a high. So that’s the problem.
Judge Salinas
That’s the whole thing. And it’s just, is it illegal high, or is it not? Now, the other thing, the other twist in this is, when I first started in this program, abstinence was abstinence. You are not. When you graduate our program, you have to be free from all drugs, no matter what. Over the course of time, I’ve come to be converted into the MaT program, the medically assisted treatment programs, which means we do allow our clients to graduate our program. If they’re on certain types of medically assistant programs, that is approved by a doctor, suboxone comes to mind. And that was a big adjustment for me. Okay. Because I grew up in this program thinking absence abstinence was absent. That’s what it meant.
Judge Salinas
So we do have to evolve as a treatment program, just like we have to evolve as a court system when these things come and are introduced into the community.
Terri
Sure, sure. Okay. In that meeting, was also your person monitoring the gps?
Judge Salinas
Yes.
Terri
Which was interesting. Yeah. They had to chime in a few times about where somebody was. And, you know, I found the discussion that you guys all had, it was. Seemed complete. It was honest. You really did kind of evaluate the person as a person, where they are on their journey, what else they have going on in their life. Some of them had, you know, a couple of deaths or, you know, something that had happened in their own personal medical history. And so you took all of that into consideration when you looked at what they have done or not done since the last time they were in court. And then you came up with, okay, what are the next steps? Is there going to be that just reward or is there some sort of sanction that needs to be imposed?
Terri
But it was a very comprehensive conversation that you all had.
Judge Salinas
Well, we do get a report right before the meeting starts, and we classify our clients into certain groups. The good group, the fair group, and the poor group. If you’ve done everything you were supposed to do, you take your drops, you go to your meetings, and you keep.
Terri
Let me clarify for people. Your drops are drug tests.
Judge Salinas
Urine drops. Yes. My apologies. Urine drops. And one of the unique facets about our program is we drug test our clients twice a week, minimum, sometimes more in probation. You’ll get drug tested once a month if you’re lucky. And so that’s the aspect of, that’s the trust but verify aspect of our program is taking the urine drops. So we get a report and we classify our clients into the good group, fair group, and poor group. If you had a good week and did everything you had to do in the good group, and we can discuss what happens in the courtroom later on in our talk.
Judge Salinas
If you’ve done, if you had one or two hiccups and they weren’t major, like you didn’t come, you missed a drop, but it’s because you were late for work or you got off late, then we probably put you in the fair group. If you really did not have a good week, you missed drops, or you came back dirty. Dirty means you came back positive for a substance. I apologize. On a urine test, then you would probably be in the poor group. And like you said, sanctions or rewards? We do have a sanction and reward basis for which group you’re in. The rewards that we have, we administer in court. It can be from candy to a standing ovation to we have. Now, for the last two years, we’ve had wheel of fortune spin the wheel. And we. And our clients really like that.
Judge Salinas
They have things on there like a standing ovation. Get extra candy. We do have $25 kroger card. We have parking, free parking, because in our courts, in our building, we have free parking for the public. But it’s like, it’s a distance away if you want closer car parking. So you don’t have to walk as fast or as far it is paint parking. So we do have that as a reward, and that’s on the wheel. If they spin and get it and get on that. But one of the things I really like about our clients for those in the good group, if they’re not in the group, good group, and they believe they are, they want to know why. So our clients have to be your clients. Our clients have to be invested in the program.
Judge Salinas
And once they get invested, they want to know, and they get. They’re proud of themselves for being the good group, just like they’re unhappy with themselves when they’re not in a good group. I’ve been told more, on more than one occasion by case managers or in defense attorneys that the clients really do not, like, do not want to face the judge when they’ve had a bad. A bad week. And conversely, they want to. They want to before the judge when they’ve had a good week, because, you know, it may be the only time they’ve been acknowledged that they’ve done well that week. And I can’t imagine going through a life like that, not having someone tell you a good job that very rarely happening. So we do like not to get ahead of myself.
Judge Salinas
We do classify our clients in three different groups, and our discussions and our staffing in our meeting is based on where they are, which group they’re in. Which group they’re in depends on how they’ve done the last seven days.
Terri
Yeah. And the whole group kind of has a say. And, you know, you were very good about. Do you agree? Should we, you know, do this? And so it was kind of a collective group thing, for sure. So then in the afternoon, the clients come to court, and you then call them up one at a time, and you kind of go over things. In general, it moves pretty quickly. There’s not a ton of, you know, time with each person. But I will say that there was a ton of encouragement. Even when you gave them a sanction of some sort and kind of talked it through with them, you were still very encouraging to them. You know, don’t quit. Keep going. I understand, you know, little step back, but let’s keep going. And you were very client specific.
Terri
I mean, you seem to know their circumstances, their struggles. You celebrated and empathized with them while still holding them accountable. And so, yeah, we talked about those rewards and fist pump with the judge and. Yeah, yeah, free parking and stuff. So, I mean, there was one, at least that thanked you for allowing them to participate in this program. There was one client that had been struggling a bit, and you asked them, hey, what’s going on? And they responded, it’s like the quote of the day, nothing that’s out of the ordinary. It’s like, you know, that just kind of sums up their daily struggles.
Judge Salinas
Well, one of the things that’s unique about the court aspect of the program is we’re a little bit laid back, and we do have deputies in there. We do have, we have decorum, but we allow kids in the courtroom because many times our clients can’t have, don’t have money for babysitters or they can’t find them. So we do allow kids in the program. We allow family support in there as well. We do bring them up to the bench in the order in the groups, all the group. If you’re in the good group, you go first. If you want a first in line on the wheel, then you get to be called first. Absent that, we go alphabetically. The other thing you mentioned, I didn’t have.
Judge Salinas
Sometimes I don’t have interact much with our clients, especially during the good group, because they’ve had a good week. Yeah, it’s kind of weird because we have a national conference that says ideally the judge should spend two to three minutes per client. Well, sometimes we have about 40 clients, and it’s just not feasible. And if you’ve had a good group or a client in the good group, they’ve done everything well. You want to save the court time for those that need that discussion, that need either the extra encouragement and you do it. But I always try to ask those in the good group. I always ask the case managers, at least I try to. Is there anything specific I should encourage them or acknowledge this week on this client? You know, that they have, you know, something good other than doing everything they should?
Judge Salinas
Did they do anything, go above and beyond? And if they. If they did, then I will acknowledge that as well. But we do want to move our clients along the court session along, because we have, at any given time, 20 to 30 clients that we have to talk, that we have to see. Our case managers are multitasking. They’re seeing, they’re talking, checking in clients, seeing their clients. Sometimes our clients have last minute requests, last minute issues that come up. So it is a fast moving pace. We do allow the clients to come up to the bench. Normally in an adversarial setting. The clients are at the defense table or the prosecutor. They come up to the bench, and we also allow clients to be there remotely as well.
Judge Salinas
That’s one of the new aspects that we got from the pandemic, is we like to be open, and we use that as a reward session as well. If you’re in the good group and you get a remote spin, you want to be remote, that’s fine, because it is a hassle getting all your stuff together and coming to court and stuff. And if you can do it on your 15 minutes break, more power to you. So we incorporate in the session. I’m very proud of the fact that we have the in person session, obviously, and we incorporate the virtual, the remote part of it as well as best we can into the court session.
Judge Salinas
So I do try to acknowledge each client, maybe, but I want to, I do want to spend more time on those clients that have not had a good week, maybe ascertain why they haven’t had a good week. If it’s something personal, I don’t want to put that on the record because it is on the record or it’s out in public. If it’s something delicate, I for sure don’t want to put that on the record. Sometimes they just want to share that with their case managers or their lawyers, and then the case manager may share it in the, in our meeting, but they’ll tell me, judge, I would prefer, the client would prefer that not be set in court. That’s fine. We don’t want to mess anyone up.
Terri
Right? Yeah, that’s true. I saw all of that. You know, it clipped along, but I didn’t feel that it was rushed or that anybody wasn’t given the chance to say what they needed to say. And you’re right. In that initial morning meeting, there were some of those personal things, but you didn’t talk to them about it. You just encouraged them in a general way, maybe acknowledged that, you know, there were things going on you were aware of, but, you know, good for you. So, yeah, everything I saw is you really you, the system really tries, thinks of the end result, right. And that is that recovery from that addiction and then hoping them, keeping them on the straight and narrow after that with, you know, whatever, how, why ever they ended up in court in the first place. Right. To not do that again.
Terri
So I thought it was great. What criteria do you use to evaluate whether you’re going to offer this option of drug court to someone?
Judge Salinas
Well, the first one is the prosecutor. They are the gatekeepers because they’re going to be dismissing the case once and when and if a person completes our program and graduates. So they’ve been very accommodating to the kind of cases that we want. The ones that we normally do not take are violent offenses, murders, rape. We don’t take dealing offenses. We do take high level possession, offensive, but no dealing offenses. Now, the prosecutor has been more open to that, but I understand because they have to run for reelection as well. So the prosecutor is the gatekeeper. And we, in consultation with us, we come up with the type of cases that we want to have and see in our program. The main thing is you have to have addiction in there somewhere.
Judge Salinas
And the unique thing about this is, again, if you complete our program, your case is dismissed. There’s a lot of problem solving courts around the country and indiana that are probation based. In other words, the judge will order you into the problem solving court arena. And so once you complete that, you may terminate your probation early, but you still have a conviction on your record, and you may get that expunged in two or three years or maybe earlier, if that’s by agreement of the parties. But in our program, I’ve always liked the fact that we are pre plea. Our cases get dismissed once you complete our program. We are technically a one year program with three phases, phase one, two and three, four months in each phase.
Judge Salinas
But I’m going to tell you that the percentage of people that complete a program in one year is probably around 10%. As you can imagine, it is a struggle. We’ve had clients that intentionally sabotage themselves a week of graduation because they’re just scared to be on their own. They’re scared not to have that safety net of the case manager calling them, hey, how you doing today? Having that court meeting, you know, to go to the text from the drug lab saying, you have a drug test today, or you don’t have one today. So we’ve had clients sabotage themselves literally the week of graduation because they were just scared. And so the average length of time is anywhere between 18 months to two years in our program. It’s not unusual for that.
Judge Salinas
If you get, if you graduate within the one year timeframe, it is rare and very much appreciated because we do want to have our clients healthy and happy going forward.
Terri
Yeah. Interesting point about the sabotage. Do you folks have programs that you support, programs that you recommend them to get into after to help keep them accountable on some level?
Judge Salinas
Well, I wish I could tell you that we had a row that we have a robust aftercare program, but we don’t because in order to be in our court, you have to have a criminal case pending. Right. So once you graduate our program and the prosecutor dismissed the case, we lose jurisdiction over you. So that’s why when you are at graduation, there are certain things that we require. One, we require at a minimum 90 to 120 days of abstinence from whatever drug or from all drugs. Two, that you are, have been, have paid something on the fees that are assessed and have been in a treatment program actively during all that time in that last phase. And we do want a letter of graduation from the provider.
Judge Salinas
And if you are in an mat program, a medically assistant program from the provider and from the doctor as well. Now, you cannot always guarantee success. We’ve had horrific consequences with clients very near, within a month of them graduating. And we just, we go, we always go back and self reflect. Did we miss something? And, because, you know, they have to want it. And some people are just good at doing what they got to do while they’re in, while they’re mandated by a court system. We’ve had clients run from our program, from a treatment provider three or four times. And that’s another adjustment I used to have that I’ve had over the time in this program.
Judge Salinas
It took me a while to get used to the fact that people are going to leave a treatment program three or four times, maybe four or five times before it actually kicks in their brain that they’re trying to help them, that they need this program. So it’s a, this process has been adjustment for clients, for the program, and for the people that are trying to help the clients, the judge, the prosecutor, the defense attorney, the defense, the case manager. So we’ve all had to evolve over time in the changing environment of the program and the, and in finding the right candidates for our program.
Terri
Sure. Yeah. You might not know this because, as you said, once they’re out of your program, you lose jurisdiction over them. So you maybe wouldn’t know unless you saw them return to court. Do you have any idea what the success rate is?
Judge Salinas
Yeah, I’ll have to get that to you. But were. Don’t quote me on this. I think were at like 35% of our clients. This was a couple years ago, maybe six, seven, eight years ago, when we usually don’t. We don’t have all the funds we use for our clients. So when the local school system university wants to do an assessment for free, we say, hey, come on in and do it right. We were above the national average of people that came back into our program within two or three years. There was some nuances to that, like maybe they got rearrested for like, a driving without a license to be.
Terri
Yeah, they’re still in recovery.
Judge Salinas
So one. But one of the things that we did change because were getting so many clients getting these, driving without suspended, driving without a license, you know, is we now have a contract with the local legal aid society to help our clients get licenses as well.
Terri
Okay.
Judge Salinas
So, I mean, we’re trying.
Terri
Yeah, you’re trying. You really are trying to make their life better and to change their trajectory with, you know, what you’re doing. Definitely. Do you, how many healthcare professionals do you see come through there?
Judge Salinas
Well, that’s the unique thing about this program is when the weast, when I started as overseeing this court 16 and a half years ago, 17 years ago, it was geared toward professionals. It was geared toward that one person who had that one charge, and if the charge didn’t get dismissed, then they were going to lose their license, they were going to lose their livelihood. And so that was the, that was our target audience. Over time, the target audience has become the addict, the person with four or five or eight or nine cases pending. And so that person, the professional with one in one case, who may have had a problem for six, seven, eight months, but is not the long term addict. We’ve lost that in the system because this program we call those low need clients, not high need clients.
Judge Salinas
And we’re not supposed to make, mix the need clients together. We don’t want the low need people mixing in with the high need people because they see different people. They see in their lives personally. Right. And so we don’t want them mixing up. So we don’t see as, we don’t. We’ve had to come up with different programs for that professional, because I didn’t want to lose the opportunity for them to get their case dismissed.
Terri
Right. Yeah. Interesting term, low needs. I mean, it’s the same you know, substance use disorder. Yeah. So they, you know, need the same type of thing, but there are recovery programs and stuff out there.
Judge Salinas
And then the other aspect, like nurses, we have, you know, we’ve had quite a few, and we have had quite a few nurses and have one or two right now. The other thing is we had to come to work over time with the nursing board, the state. State, because, you know, what good is it if you get your case dismissed if they don’t acknowledge what you’ve done here and they still, and they’re still going to yank your license? I can understand other people’s perspective. Right. The nursing boards. I can understand saying, listen, we got to be careful. We can’t have someone who put, who has had an issue with drug abuse in the past treating people. I get that. And so I understand that they have to monitor separately to abide by their rules.
Judge Salinas
Over time, they’ve come to understand that our, we’re on the same team. We’re fighting for the same cause, get this person clean and help them stay clean. And so we’ve got more cooperation from the state boards on nursing and recent, more recently than we have, say, years ago.
Terri
That’s great. That’s good. Are there some people who are in opposition to drug courts? And if so, what is their main argument?
Judge Salinas
Well, we are known as the touchy feely court. Okay. Within my jurisdiction here. And I can say the opposition was more back when it started in the nineties and early two thousands. You know, why are we treating people like this? And are you making a difference? Are you making a difference in the community? And my answer is, and this is going to be blunt, we are not. My program is not making a difference in the Indianapolis community. And here’s my rationale. We see 90 clients. That’s it. This town is over 850,000 people. You want me to make a difference? You know, probation sees 7000 people. Right. But they drug test once a month. If you get caught being drug tested once a month, you’re not a very good addict. Okay.
Terri
Yeah. That’s just, you know, do they know when those drug tests are going to happen?
Judge Salinas
Well, no, but if you get drug tested within the first week and, you know, they’re testing you once a month, you know, you got at least 21 days free.
Terri
That’s true.
Judge Salinas
We, where we are making a difference is within the drug treatment community. Within those 90 to 120 people, 150 that we see and graduate, we’re making a difference within that community. Now, if you were to multiply our program to the level that probation has, I would say we would make a tremendous impact in the community. The problem is we are a high need program. In other words, our clients are high need. Probation can see anywhere, one single probation officer can see anywhere between 70 to 100 clients because their job is just to make sure you’re doing what the judge tells you to do. Our case managers, their job is to help you do what the judge asks you to do. And so our case managers are limited to 30 clients per manager.
Judge Salinas
So if you were to replicate our program to the levels that we do in probation, I am confident that we would make a tremendous difference in our community. As it is now, we’re making a difference within the drug treatment community, that hardcore community.
Terri
Absolutely. Do you have a client success story that you can share, something that kind of sticks out as to how you guys really made a difference for someone?
Judge Salinas
We’ve had clients that have graduated and then go into the treatment profession themselves.
Terri
Oh.
Judge Salinas
And so that’s always nice. Another thing I’m proud of. I’ve had, I think, over about 30 drug free babies in the 1617 plus years that I’ve been in this. And for me, that makes an impact because I’ve been to conferences where they show videos of babies born addicted to fentanyl or some other substance. And it is a hard video to watch.
Terri
Yeah.
Judge Salinas
And so when you, the first thing I ask when clients are pregnant, when they have their baby, is with the baby clean. That’s it. And we have another rule. If you’re pregnant in a program, you go from being tested twice a week to three times a week because, you know, we have another life to consider. So the success stories are those stories that we’ve had clients come back and say thank you. You know, they’ve maintained their jobs and stuff there. They got families. And I’ve run into clients on the street and says, they say, you are my drug court judge and thank you. But the one that stands out have been the ones that are now in treatment places as counselors.
Terri
Yeah.
Judge Salinas
And I think those are the ones that stand out as well, right?
Terri
Absolutely. Well, this is great. I want to thank you not only for your time today, but for letting me sit in on court and really just kind of see what it’s about. I really appreciate that. Then the time and energy that you’ve given to me and then this conversation so our listeners can hear about it. It’s not something I’m very familiar with, certainly in my role and what I do. And I think a lot of the listeners are probably in the same spot. So it’s really good to hear this perspective and to hear what’s going on.
Judge Salinas
I do appreciate the ability or the opportunity to be here again. We’re based indianapolis, Indiana, Marion county. I’m Jose Salinas. I’m the presiding judge for Marion Cancer Court 23 and the drug treatment and reentry courts. If I want to leave your audience with one message, is drug treatment works. It is not for everyone. The requirements are harder than regular probation, but it works. And if you as a community, you invest in a court system to have this initiative, your community will better for it and that I am confident of.
Terri
Thank you. That’s great. All right. Thank you, judge very much for your time.
Judge Salinas
Take care. Be safe.
Terri
Thank you. You, too.
