Mike Williams: Don't give up on drink-drive offenders

Mike Williams

HAWKE'S Bay appears to be home to the worst repeat drink-driver in the country and it's tempting to give up on this offender who's now serving his 33rd jail sentence.
But we shouldn't.
Alcoholism is a curable disease, just as are addictions to any other substance, and sending this bloke to jail yet again, though it has the attraction of at least keeping him off the road for another year, is not a long-term answer.
One possible remedy is what I witnessed a couple of weeks ago when I spent a day at one of the two experimental alcohol and drug courts at Henderson in West Auckland, but let's go back a step.
Six years ago when I came free from politics, my dear old friend, Sir Paul Holmes, shoulder-tapped me to become involved in a charity aimed at educating young people about the drug methamphetamine or "P".
Sir Paul's concern was that young people were unknowingly getting hooked on this awful substance; it was being sold as a drug with no downside.
I began some research which took me to dark places.
I discovered that while a meth epidemic was raging in the western states of the US, it had hardly touched the other side of the continent. Conviction numbers around meth were huge in Los Angeles, but, in New York, hardly registered.
The only explanation for this phenomenon was that the drug entered the US from Asia via the western states and, by the time it had spread across to the east, the horror stories around meth were well documented and the drug users there were avoiding it, sticking to the devils they knew.
This was the clue that sent Sir Paul on a gruelling round of public meetings aimed at educating folks about just what this stuff did. I think it worked.
With the jails in California overflowing and the costs of incarceration becoming ever more onerous, the state tried out a specialist drug court.
The idea here was to offer carefully monitored sobriety and abstinence as an alternative to a jail sentence and bring rehabilitation and the offenders' families into the recovery loop.
When retired businessman, Tony Gibbs became president of the NZ Howard League, he persuaded me to attend an address by Judge Peggy Hora, a Californian pioneer of alcohol and drug courts.
The upshot of this visit and research by a far-sighted NZ judge was the establishment of experimental alcohol and drug courts in central Auckland and Waitakere.
The day I spent at the Waitakere court at the invitation of the judge was a revelation.
In the morning, the judge, police prosecutor, lawyers, parole and probation officials discussed the 16 cases they were to review after lunch.
The vast majority of these wrongdoers (all male) were there because of the booze, and one had nearly as many convictions for drunk driving as the Hawke's Bay offender.
Most of these had been fitted with monitoring devices called Scrams which could detect alcohol and drug use. These devices send data to a central site in the US which provides reports to the court. One of the offenders to be seen in the afternoon had a negative Scram report; meaning in his case alcohol had been detected.
After lunch, we saw the 16 people we'd discussed in the morning.
Each began by stating his number of days "clean".
This varied from a new entrant at just 13 days sober to the extreme repeat offender who'd managed nearly 500 days without alcohol.
The positive Scram report turned out to come from the innocent use of an alcohol-based hand wash product which the offender managed to produce in court.
Many of the people there had been sent to drug and alcohol rehabilitation courses and, in many instances, a supportive parent or partner was in attendance.
What struck me most were the stories these people told.
In most, if not all, cases the period of enforced sobriety they'd managed was not a burden but a blessed relief and their lives were approaching what you and I would regard as normal.
I added up the sober days reported in just one day's court sitting, multiplied them by the daily cost of imprisonment and quickly got to more than a million dollars.
Alcohol and drug courts in New Zealand are a far-sighted experiment and credit should go to Justice ministers Simon Power and Judith Collins, but in my view it's time to extend their reach.
Perhaps if we had such a court in Hawke's Bay, the notorious repeat drunk driver would be in rehab, wearing a high-tech bangle and not costing us all another $100,000 for a year in jail.
Just perhaps his life would better and we'd all be a little bit safer when his latest sentence is up.
#Mike Williams is a former Labour Party president who grew up in Hawke's Bay. He is a director of Auckland Transport and the NZ Howard League chief executive.