four years now governor scott appointed me prior to that i was a prosecutor and we worked together at that time at the state attorney's office and prior to that i also worked for the courts as counsel doing research and writing orders for the judges here in town and prior to that i was in private practice doing creditors rights and bankruptcy and so how tolls a little bit about how  those experiences i guess prepared you to become a county court judge for sarasota well i think first it's important to understand what a county court judge does and what the jurisdiction is the county court judge so county court judges here are misdemeanors and civil cases where the amount of controversy is less than fifteen thousand dollars so about sixty five percent of my caseload is criminal and the other as the civil cases which are primarily evictions consumer debt and insurance type cases but in the criminal misdemeanors are a variety of types of crimes ok so you have misdemeanors that can be very very serious like domestic battery and driving under the influence and then you can have misdemeanors that are less serious like driving without a valid license or some of the quality of life crimes that we see frequently in sarasota like having an open container or lodging which is setting up your campsite in a public place  i see a lot of different types of crimes lot of different types of people it is always a different story you know a different background and that's one of the reasons i love county court is because of the people of a variety of things that i see so i think being a prosecutor certainly equipped me for this role and just having grown up here and hearing about this community and i love practicing law when i was a lawyer i loved being a judge now so i spent a lot of time in court so i felt like i was prepared and i continually try to improve and i think that's important to kind of underscore is the  really the intangible preparation that having grown up here having been from this community town prepares you for dealing with some of the unique issues that we see in this community so one of the programs that you kind of spearheading and off the ground here in this community that has had a significant impact is comprehensive treatment court granted right so why don't you tell us a little bit about what that is and kind of how that came to be ok well in the twelve circuit we have had for many years because of judge owens mental health care and the mental health corps was you design to address those individuals who could meaningfully engage in outpatient treatment had been suffering from a mental illness that got them caught up in the criminal justice system or at least contributed to it  and regular probation or incarceration was simply not going to work so mental how began probably a decade ago with that in mind now i that over for judge owens when he began has planned to retire simultaneously as i was sitting in county court hearing these misdemeanors i was seeing a day lives of homeless type crimes which would be of the lodging that i had discussed earlier trespass open container and what i would see the individuals who were coming in on these crimes they appeared to be homeless and in fact many of them were homeless and i think this community or the city have seen a influx you know since we've grown up and the homeless population in town so what was happening and it had been happening for some time as that these individuals would be arrested for a crime really arrest there was no ability for them to participate in probation because they were not functioning at a level that would allow them to do it plus they're homeless so it creates another barrier to success in that regard they were simply doing short jail sentences and a lot of them were bouncing into their crisis stabilization units like the baker act you know and the margin after that so it was a pattern that you studied an individual and i did several case studies many of these people were spending half of a year or in jail even though it was just a few days at a time and racking up convictions of fifty to seventy five at a time and you could you know you could see by looking at them that they were suffering and that they were homeless they were to shovel they were often dirty they didn't appear to connect you know or understand what you were saying and it really was the definition of insanity to continue that to continue to repeat that process but yet it was something that we were doing and have done for years and it came to a point where it was too  big let it continue the the homeless population had increased so significantly and these people were creating enormous burdens because for every one up and container case the clerk of court created a file the state attorney created a file public defender created a file and law enforcement had to file and i remember being a prosecutor and seeing the same faces the same files come through week after week after week on very similar charges and you know i have to admit it did feel like a just a revolving door a waste of resources to a certain extent so i guess for you when did you start thinking about a different approach the where i really started thinking about it was when jeff bell who was at the time three or four years ago was the new warden although that's not the name they use the chief correctional officer with the sheriff's office at the jail came to court and said judge quartermaine did you know that this woman has been in juneau probably one hundred times over the last three or four years we have sent her to the baker act of our nurse things staff believes that she should be baker acted that doesn't seem to work what is it that we can do for this person this doesn't make sense so i really admired having to come to court and bring it to my attention and i don't like to not get to the answer so he and i worked together for some time learning about the mental health are you sources  group we formulated a plan for a comprehensive treatment corps so once that happened we had to identify funding that was another process we teamed with centrists down to florida and sarasota county in sarasota and the downtown and prevent district which is a subset of you know women in the city we were able to procure one point two million dollars of funding which was matched by the state for a three year program and this was the beginning and it's great now great quite an effort though to get so many people on the same page and you know that's something that i realized early on that to make an impact in this huge problem huge issue which is very diverse you know every person that you deal with has different issues has different mental health issues different substance abuse issues you know and some some folks none of the above but it's a diverse  problem and it takes a lot of people that are on the same page so it's amazing that you were able to kind of get everybody together to to put this program together so just tell us a little bit about how it's been  gone well it has been a process like you say because everyone is so different and really the input tests of the program why has to not incarcerate nonviolent misdemeanor offenders who are seriously mentally ill it does not make sense as a society for us to incarcerate people because of their mental illness which is something they cannot help now about ninety five per cent of the people who fall into this category nonviolent seriously mentally ill offender are homeless and a lot of them have been chronically homeless which is i think  city and the local government and cities did take a special look at it because it's something that everyone now is like you know when you are at right you could see it happening well and even just being a citizen and i think the vast majority of our community folks in our community understand that there are people on the street of observable obvious mental health issues that are not really able to make decisions about right and wrong decisions about complying with the rules of the society of the community that we have here and i think most people would feel for those people and understand that there needs to be a different way there knew there should be something there  them and i've seen mental health court action and i've seen the amount of people that it takes to kind of to redirect these folks into a productive of a path  we are going to find out who you are on a short term basis and that in the long term we're going to you know release you from this program when you haue a claim for permanent harm housing and mental health treatment and you can be financially independent meaning perhaps you would be entitled to certain benefits or you kind of work and so on so we have to first understand how success is defined once those things happen the charges dropped ok so since we began which was about april first we have had sixty two participants and i reviewed the statistics in preparation for this this morning now twenty three of them are still in the program are expecting two more today and we because we have twenty five spots at any given time so at this point we have as sixty five per cent success rate which is that we switched of person yet we have accomplished that's great those four goals so it is great now when you look at it is sixty five percent successful i say it is yes because not only have we given every every person with a mental illness who qualifies with their charges the opportunity to participate  this these people this sixty five percent of the total would not have otherwise had this opportunity so the alternative was zero percent success because there simply was not another method for these people to obtain help and the criminal justice system also provides incentives so for an individual who may not be willing to seek out treatment on their own because the s sheriff's office offers that now the sarasota police department offers that now the criminal justice system provides sort of a hammer doesn't it we don't want to keep you in jail ok we're going to offer you this program and if you succeed the charges are to be dropped you're not going to go back to jail and we're going to give you a better life and we want to treat you with humanity but if you don't you're going to be facing other consequences that are the traditional hands and lenses through the system so sometimes i could see people that extra little charge or first break ever so like you were saying earlier every person is different you know we use that incentives to the best we can through the criminal justice system but the primary goal is to treat these people with humanity and not put them in jail right yeah i mean it's a it's kind of a carrot and stick approach and i think it's important for people to realize and understand that it's very it's directed and geared towards people with mental health undiagnosed or have some dual diagnosis that is playing a part in their behavior right that has not been able to be addressed in in society right and i think i have some statistics  data as that of the people who have come into our program thirty percent of them suffer from schizophrenia thirty five percent suffer from bipolar the remaining group suffer from a combination of depressive disorder a post traumatic stress disorder or another less well known disorder now of the people that are in there they also have secondary diagnosis and fifty five percent of them have a secondary diagnosis of substance abuse and that is a function of many things self  medicating the environment that they have been in because they have been treated and so that is a definite challenge you know you ask about challenges the substance abuse is certainly a challenge there is a lot of great medicine for mental illness i mean it's not for everybody but that's one of the hopes and one of the best outcomes is people who are treated medically for mental illness do very very well right so it's these co occurring disorders that can certainly present a challenge and i think one of the benefits of the obvious benefit that you have in the criminal justice system is you have jurisdiction over this person you know you have power over this person to try to bend them into a program that's beneficial  imperfect process but it's a process that is do you sign to detect serious mental illness at the booking phase now we can't not in our jails have you know psychiatry as they are to do you fall histories and physicals and make diagnosis it is simply a flagging mechanism it would be impractical to do it the other way so we are able to flag them using this system plus another system which has everyone who is in the system from the judges to the defense attorneys to the stupid turnings keep their eyes and ears open and you know they make observations they say hey why don't we screen this person if they were previously flag so once their flags and a license fro does go and does a relatively short history with them and determines if that individual is willing to participate because assuming that do you found it is competent the decision must be voluntary now understanding the consequences could mean you know in the normal system jail they still have to voluntarily enter into the program so that once that occurs the defense attorney files so much and i sign  order and the person is released to the care custody of a representative of centrist town which is the mental health organization and they begin their plan to go into housing which is normally  because the program has to learn what the needs are of this person and what the income if any this person had many people have entitlement benefits through the federal government and but they have lapsed because the person has become trans rather so mentally ill that they don't even know how to get them so it took a toll to talk about housing for a minute because one of the things that i hear feedback i hear from some folks there in this world from salvation army or whatever is that there's a lack of housing for options for them how have you able to kind of work around that you know we have been able to work around it and it's because of creativity and stick to its hipness but by the same token the community needs to work on it as well the way we have found it to work is again based on a person by person analysis several people have ended up in assisted living facilities or nursing homes we had a gentleman who was basically found wandering  very sick from dementia he was an elderly some might have been using has social security benefits and handed up in jail completely out of that well today he's comfortable in the nursing homes skilled nursing facility and he has its benefits so you know that person is completely sympathetic and you know all history but then then you have other people who are more difficult to please but a lot of people have a short term at the salvation army or castle which is community assisted living that scott allare is the director of that nonprofit and then we have other lower income housing opportunities that harvey van graff as a part of halfway house says where it's like a group home that a lot of them exist we have to be very careful about which ones they are because the certification for those types of homes is not a good system at all but we are very very careful about where we place them and when we watch them you don't want to unravel yeah you know it's really amazing how the the amount of partners community partners that you've been able to bring together to make this happen this kind continuum or this chain of of support see it come together and see people move through it i think that you've been really successful in doing it so i just wanted to bring up a quarter so today and one of  article from county commissioner dieter and one of her observations was this was from her i guess her time in the state senate but she says what i'm hearing is there's a there's a more caring approach to people who have problems i think you probably get bored and she's talking to law enforcement arresting the same people over and over again i heard this intel has you not only from sheriffs but from judges they all know these prisoners by first name  do you think the this is been effective way to kind of divert at least a segment of the kind of criminal justice population out of the revolving door that cost taxpayers so much money yeah it's definitely  helped sixty five percent of the people that we are having success where they are out of that system and i believe based on my experience with many people in this situation that most of them would have been back in jail again not only that but most of them would be in a crisis stabilization unit and that's another really important point crisis stabilization for people who are suffering from acute effects of their mental illness is a very very expensive it's like when you liken it to having kidney failure and you can go on dialysis or you could wait and go to the hospital and get treated right what is more healthy for you on a long term basis and what is least expensive for whoever is going to pay for it so it's very expensive and sarasota county did a study where forty people were deemed to be super high need utilizers so they had entered a crisis stabilization unit six times within the preceding six months so for those of us imminent danger to themselves or others and marchment act is where they are so high on drugs or drunk that they have no idea what's happening and that's a lesser amount of time that they could say they are both nuanced areas they they've all been and many of them have been in a crisis able station yet some of them we will never know we can't trace them back and definitely and there's simply no method to do that but when we are able to now because of the use of sharon have i just closures and so on seeing the same people and hearing about the recidivism which was in this before comprehensive treatment court and how bad the recidivism was and seeing the same people come come through fifteen twenty thirty times what point do you say let's try different with some of these people which is exactly what you've done and you know i think the community really appreciates people that are using their positions to really make an impact that makes a difference and not just run through the motions and i know that the entire judiciary has that same kind of mission and feeling and we're joined today with one of the judges that does tremendous job in this community and is really doing good things that are making a visible observable impact for the betterment of not only the people who are coming to her courtroom but also the people enjoy this community so  judge erica quarter man i appreciate you joining us is there anything else i guess you would like to add is there anything that we can do to help you as we move into the future i think the community has to hear is database compassionate process says and to continually collaborate it is almost ignorant approach to say throw them all in jail if they're homeless alternatively it's opportunity when it comes to these low level crimes and that was her are seriously mentally ill you know well and having the experience of having been in your courtroom i understand uniquely and you know you actually do a very good job not only protecting the community but identifying some of these people can be to divert it or redirect it so we appreciate everything you're doing