Court Opinion

ID: 9742398
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 21:13:05.095266+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:24:32.219455
License: Public Domain

MEYER, Justice
(concurring).
I concur in the majority’s conclusion that the district court had discretion to revoke Osborne’s probation and did so after engaging in the Austin analysis. I write separately to express my concern with revoking probation for a sentence that was imposed with the express understanding that significant probationary services would be needed for Osborne to successfully complete probation but as to where the system simply stood back and watched him fail because he is chemically addicted. The point of providing effective substance abuse treatment to a probationer is to give him a realistic opportunity to beat the addiction and become law-abiding. In this case, no effective substance abuse treatment was made available to Osborne, so it should come as no surprise that he continued to use the chemicals to which he was addicted.
The problem of substance abuse and its implications for the justice system was intensively studied by the Minnesota Supreme Court Chemical Dependency Task Force in two reports released in 2006: Report on Adult and Juvenile Alcohol and Other Drug Offenders (Feb. 3, 2006), available at http://www.courts.state.mn.us/ documents/0/Public/Problem_Solving_ Courts/CD_Task_Foree_Report_-_Adult_ Juvenile_AOD_Offenders_-_2-06_-_ FINAL.pdf [hereinafter Task Force Report I]; and Report on the Overall Impact of Alcohol and Other Dmgs Across All Case Types (Nov. 17, 2006), available at http ://www. courts. state.mn.us/documents/ 0/Public/Problem_Solving_Courts/CDTF_ SeconcLReport_-_FinaL_(2).pdf [hereinafter Task Force Report II ]. The reports of the task force are recommended reading for any district court judge imposing a sentence on a chemically dependent individual. The primary message of the reports is a call for “a broad and fundamental shift in how Minnesota’s courts deal with [alcohol and other drug]-addicted offenders, including greater collaboration among criminal and juvenile justice system participants (while not relinquishing their core roles and responsibilities) and creation of a comprehensive multi-phased plan to institute these changes.” Task Force Report I at 10.
Among the conclusions of the task force, and most germane to this case, was the somewhat startling report that substance abuse treatment has virtually no positive measurable effect when provided to juveniles or to prison inmates. A review of over 1,600 program evaluations of in-prison programs targeted toward offenders with alcohol and other drug problems found that drug-focused group counseling interventions or traditional boot camp programs had no appreciable effect on re-arrest rates or re-incarceration rates. Task Force Report II at 52. The task force also notes that in one long-term study, offenders who attended in-prison alcohol and other drug treatment but were not provided continuing care in the community relapsed at the same rate as offenders who received no in-prison treatment at all. Id. The task force recommended that jailed offenders should be *257given treatment and associated services for chemical dependency problems once they leave jail, and that the judicial branch in particular should give this issue further attention. Id. at 53. In particular, the task force noted, “violent offenders who are chemically dependent should receive all of the necessary treatment services, both while incarcerated and upon re-entering the community, to prepare them for optimal success.” Id.
In this case, Osborne received some chemical dependency counseling as a juvenile and attended an in-prison program but he received no aftercare. That he failed at treatment is a true statement. According to the studies, his failure is expected. If district court judges are ordering substance abuse treatment to be provided as a condition of probation, I would suggest that the offered treatment be reasonably calculated to achieve success.