OTTAWA — Putnam County’s new Common Pleas Court judge told the Chamber of Commerce that he wants to create a drug court.
“Drug court would be considered a specialized docket,” Judge Keith Schierloh said at Henry’s Restaurant on Tuesday. “The Supreme Court will not allow any court to establish one for at least one year.”
Putnam County wouldn’t be able to establish a drug court until May 2018 after he had been on the bench for one year, Schierloh said. He had time to work with a few drug courts before when he was working in northwest Ohio.
An individual who is not sentenced to prison and has an addiction problem has the opportunity to receive local treatment, Schierloh said. After a defendant enters a guilty plea, the judge would order them to counseling or to enter a treatment facility as part of his or her sentencing. As part of the drug court program, if a defendant fails to follow the judge’s orders the judge could throw them in jail.
“They’re basically getting a free bite of the apple,” Schierloh said. “To not go to jail, to not go to prison and make sure they follow through. It falls at that individual to make sure they’re following through with their AA program, they’re staying clean and seeking a job.”
Drug courts are difficult to maintain because of personnel issues and proper judicial procedure, he said. It takes a lot of manpower and time to keep track of everyone sentenced to rehab and programs. In Putnam County, there is only one probation officer overseeing everyone in the county.
There are procedures to follow when it comes convicting someone and as much as people want to pass judgment quickly there are rules that need to be followed, he said. It takes some time to get to the sentencing phase. Financing drug courts is a challenge too.
“In the state of Ohio there are 55 drug courts. Of those only 19 are funded through grants,” Schierloh said. “The other ones are paid through public funding or businesses. Some of the rehab programs are not cheap.”
If creating a drug court in Putnam County was a viable option he would support it, he said. He wants to make sure a drug court would be worthwhile and sustainable before working to implement one. The numbers from drug courts show of all the people who go through their programs only 13 percent successfully complete the programs.
“We want to approach the Supreme Court hopefully by the end of this year or the first part of next year to see if we can streamline our certification,” Schierloh said. “The timeline to put this together, we’re probably looking at January 2019. There’s a lot of work that goes into it.”
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