Judge Rowley has been instrumental in shaping the family treatment court model in New York State, having founded the Tompkins County Family Treatment Court in 2001. In 2007, he was elected president of the New York Association of Drug Treatment Court Professionals.
What do you think are the challenges facing family treatment courts in New York?
We had the most miserable day in family treatment court history yesterday. It was so discouraging. A graduate’s son, 17 years old, died of an overdose. So if you want to ask me what the problems are today, I’ll give you a list of them.
The needs of families facing neglect charges are complex, and some of the challenges are easier to meet than others. For example, I think we’re doing pretty well on access generally to substance abuse treatment (although we’ve got some serious needs around mother/child programs), but there’s still a lack of good coordination between mental health services and substance abuse treatment. And many of the people we see have serious underlying problems, including multi-generational poverty, a history of their own neglect or abuse, and/or a background in foster case. It’s a contrast to the criminal drug court, not because the populations are all that different but because when you’re trying to take a comprehensive approach to the health of the family there’s just such a large number of issues that need to be tackled.
Would you say that these are the same challenges that face family treatment courts around the country?
The big difference isn’t between family treatment courts from one state to the next, but between the different drug courts and their populations. When you’re looking at an individual’s needs, especially in a criminal drug court, it’s “either you do the right thing or you don’t, and we’ve got jail or prison sanctions if you don’t.”. As long as you’re staying clean you’re pretty much okay. But family treatment courts can have parents who are attending their substance abuse treatment and testing clean, but who are facing a number of other problems—single parenting, housing problems, or the effects of substance abuse on babies in utero, kids with special needs. All these kinds of stressors can make a family disintegrate even when the substance abuse is being addressed.
How do you deal with the discouraging part of that?
We really hold onto our successes. But it’s tricky. A recent graduate just returned to court. These are complex problems and these people are not traveling a linear path. Old issues recur. We had a couple who did really well in our program. They had three young kids, and both parents were both severely addicted to crack cocaine and dealing out of their home. They both did a year in our program and did remarkable work in that time. But two months after leaving the program they’ve split up, and this has raised a lot of difficult issues. And though the crack addiction hasn’t resurfaced at this point, we’re back involved with this family.
So you really have to get philosophical about it. Another way to think about it, from a judge’s perspective, is that it’s not our job to fix people. Our job isn’t even to change people: our job is to change the system so that people have the best chance of success that’s possible. We’re facilitating their access to medical care, to treatment, to public health services, and to employment training, whereas the traditional system in its cold way can too easily say, “Hey, you don’t have that piece of paper, get to the end of the line.” So our job is really to make the system work for people, and I think we’re actually quite successful in that. We are giving them a much better chance to try to tackle their problems than they had before.
Many family treatment courts in New York struggle to admit all eligible respondents. Have you been successful in this regard?
It’s a really interesting question. Of course it’s driven in part by the size of your jurisdiction and population and if Brooklyn Family Treatment Court did what we did they wouldn’t have nearly enough judges available. We take all cases. Any case that has substance abuse alleged is automatically referred to us, and we do a pretty hard sell of saying this is your best option. Our social services department believes that the best work being done for families is being done in family treatment court. So these families come to us.
The challenge of that, of course, is that we’re not screening anybody out and part of the current discouragement is that we have such a large number of people with borderline personalities and serious sexual compulsions and abuse histories—and success is very hard to come by with these folks. Success as far as greater stability, we can do that. But as far as return of children and the subsequent birth of clean babies and all that, it’s a really treacherous area. So I think it’s very important that this option be available to as many people as possible, and that the resources be there. I wouldn’t do ours any differently from the way we do it. I love being able to say yes to all the families, but there is that flip side to it, like “Oh God, not another person with this kind of a history, this one’s going to be tough.” But that’s what we’re here for. We’re here to have the door open for all these people, and we can’t predict outcomes. We don’t try to.
Do you have any sense of what types of respondents are more likely to succeed than others?
I don’t think there’s any question that the more resources a family has, the better off they are. Recently, a second family that’s done really well was a family with more resources to begin with, even though at the moment they came in they looked as bad as anybody. Mom was involved in selling and buying crack and dad was using like crazy and they had three boys at home and things had really deteriorated. The kids weren’t going to school, they were going to lose their house, she’d lost 40 pounds. On the face of it, this was a family that was dying. And in effect it was true. But because of the court intervention and because of their saying yes to the opportunity, nine months later there’s a remarkable degree of health in this family. They’ve both been sober the whole time, they’re both employed and in counseling, the kids are in school.
All those things are happening, but if you look at the differences between them and some of the other families we see, these folks do not have the sexual abuse or the trauma histories and they are not products of prior foster homes. The woman does have a dual diagnosis, but she does not have a personality disorder, which is so challenging. My own opinion is that a lot of the most difficult cases are really starting out with attachment disorders—people who had severely disrupted early childhood and come from families where the parents had severely disrupted early childhoods. We can’t in a year or two change those kinds of things. We try to say that this is about the next generation. We try to see that the kids who are born to these families are having their needs met in a different way than their parents. And to the extent that the parents are there and can be involved in it, that’s a great thing. But there’s really some pretty serious damage to a lot of these families.
Do you feel that family treatment courts in general and yours in particular are sufficiently protective of both the parent’s and the child’s rights?
I think that early on we had a lot of concerns being raised about whether or not we were sufficiently protective of the children’s rights. Our focus is on the parents and we get attached to these parents and we want them to succeed. And so a year down the line we’re sending them to another rehab and then they blow out of that one and we find them yet another rehab. And so we’ve worked over the last number of years to balance that and make sure that the children’s voices are being heard. I still think that that’s a challenge for us.
What is your practice regarding the use of jail sanctions?
I came from the criminal drug courts, and I wanted to be able to continue to use jail sanctions in family court because I found them to be effective in a criminal drug court. But there wasn’t any chance that that was going to be accepted as a model, so we started without it. I don’t think we’ve really lost anything by not having it. And then a couple of years ago we got into a situation where we had a number of new participants particularly resistant to complying with the program, and we as a team went back to the drawing board and finally ended up with a series of graduated sanctions that does end in a weekend jail sanction. We’ve never imposed it. We do a community service thing, we do a day reporting thing, and then they have to go to jail if they haven’t done that. And everyone’s complied so far.
We also use jail for someone we know is actively using who is not reporting to court. I give their lawyer a final warning:--“they’ve got to be in court next Tuesday or I’m going to issue a warrant for example”--and we’ll pick them up and take them to their next rehab. But that’s the extent of it; it’s really more of an intervention to try to save their life. And even with that we’re very sparing. We’ve got a woman right now who’s very unstable and they won’t hospitalize her and I don’t really have a legitimate reason to jail her and so I won’t jail her. It’s tearing us all up, but I don’t have a legitimate reason to do it.
What sanctions have you found effective in motivating participants?
We heavily emphasize our incentives. We have our regular phase advancement ceremony with a certificate. We give them some gift certificates donated through the Rotary and we also have a grant from a reading group to buy them books. For 100 percent compliance there’s an incentive basket with gift cards or candy bars or coffee or videos or cosmetics or that kind of thing. And you know as silly as that is, people really work hard to earn that and are disappointed when they don’t get it. And we give a lot of verbal praise.
On the sanctions side, it’s typical stuff. I usually start with an essay. We’ll do things like daily reporting to our family treatment court office. I rarely use community service anymore, but I used to use it. What we found that’s really effective for us is seeing more of people when they’re not compliant. So it’s either daily reporting or our day reporting program, where they’re in the program from 9 to 3.
As the new New York President of the New York Association of Drug Treatment Court Professionals, what are your plans?
At our next conference in March 2008, we’re planning to highlight our partnerships. I’m very encouraged by the statement from a number of the new commissioners from our partners at the Office of Children and Family Services. I know Judge Judy Harris Kluger’s office has been working for a number of years now to try to make better connections at the top level, and we’ve all made the connections at our local level, but there’s been a disconnect in between. So we’re really trying to start by recognizing how important the partnerships are and then pushing those partnerships to deliver more for each other.
One example is this: for personality disorders there is an effective treatment dialectical behavioral therapy that has been proven effective, but it’s kind of sporadically used in limited fashion around the state. I’ve talked to Office of Children and Family Services about trying to introduce this therapy into the state inpatient system, so that we can start with an intervention in the community and then pick it right up there. Then when someone gets discharged they can be discharged right back into that system again. So I think there’s all sorts of potential for us, recognizing that we’re working with clients facing the same challenges and that we can kind of learn from each other about how to be more effective. But it really takes some close coordination and real commitment and money to be able to say, “Yes, this is going to be a priority, we’re going to do a better job with this particular population that is driving you crazy and that we’re just kicking out because we can’t deal with them.” It’s easy to do lip service, but I’m looking to making the partnerships actually bear fruit. We’ve got to have results from working together.