The 24/7 Sobriety Project
By Larry Long
I became a prosecutor in Bennett County, South Dakota, in 1973 and I’ve been a prosecutor ever since. In that time I have learned three things. One, the criminal justice system is dominated by alcohol and drug dependence and addiction; two, the sanctions employed to address this reality do not work particularly well; and three, there is a better way, namely, the 24/7 Sobriety Project.
Alcohol Rules
As a young prosecutor, I observed that almost every crime committed in my county was alcohol related. That is, the defendant was either drunk; attempting to obtain money to buy alcohol; or attempting to steal alcohol when he engaged in the conduct for which he was arrested. I also had a lot of repeat business. I prosecuted the same people over and over again. The crimes were sometimes different, but the presence of alcohol as a contributing factor was almost always there. I assumed that the predominance of alcohol in crime was local to my area. I soon learned otherwise.
After nearly 18 years as a prosecutor in Bennett County, I joined the South Dakota Attorney General’s Office as chief deputy in 1991. I had the opportunity to appear in courts all across South Dakota and discovered that the bulk of crimes statewide were alcohol related. When I became Attorney General in 2003, the governor appointed me to a working group on corrections. Our task was to develop recommendations to address the ever increasing population of the state penitentiary. I knew that addressing alcohol and drug dependence was key to reducing the incarcerated population.
From FY99 through FY07, nearly 25,000 South Dakotans were convicted of felonies. Fifty-nine percent of those convictions were the direct result of alcohol or drugs. During the past three years, on average 70 percent of men and 47 percent of women incarcerated in South Dakota were alcohol dependent; 35 percent of men and 50 percent of women were methamphetamine dependent and many inmates suffered from multiple dependencies. After studying this data, I knew that alcohol and drugs ruled the system.
The Honor System Doesn’t Work
The probation system in South Dakota and most states is essentially an honor system. Defendants on probation are required to meet with their probation officers on a regular basis, often monthly. Probation officers otherwise have little day to day contact with defendants unless they are re-arrested, usually for an unrelated criminal offense. In truth, in many instances supervision is provided by local law enforcement because most probation offices lack the resources or the personnel to meaningfully “supervise” the probationers assigned to them.
Parole officers face similar challenges. They are burdened with very large caseloads and limited resources. In South Dakota, 40 percent of parolees are re-arrested within five years of release.
A Better Way: The 24/7 Sobriety Project
The usual message to drunk drivers is, “if you don’t quit drinking and driving, we will make you quit driving.” Enforcement efforts are geared to keeping drunk drivers off the road. This is done through license suspensions or revocation, and incarceration for repeat violations. Because of the honor system approach to probation, many offenders continue to drive illegally and are held to account only when they are re-arrested. The system is simply not designed to address the underlying problem of alcohol and illegal drug dependency or addiction.
The 24/7 Sobriety Project is a better way. The 24/7 Sobriety Project’s message to drunk drivers is, “if you don’t quit drinking and driving, we will make you quit drinking.” Although not a substitute for drug and alcohol treatment, the project attacks alcohol dependence and addiction in a new and more direct way.
A 24/7 Sobriety pilot project was launched in three South Dakota counties in February 2005. The target group was DUI defendants with at least one prior DUI conviction within the previous 10 years. At the request of the project, judges imposed a special set of bond conditions on the target group. The conditions were:
1) defendants must completely abstain from the consumption of alcohol;
2) defendants must report to a test site (typically the sheriff’s office) every morning at 7 a.m. and every evening at 7 p.m. and submit to a test of breath, blood or other bodily substance for the consumption of alcohol.
Defendants who tested positive were immediately incarcerated for violating the bond condition. Bench warrants were issued for defendants who failed to report to the test site on time. All defendants who violated a bond condition were incarcerated for 24-hours before making a court appearance where the same conditions were imposed.
The design of the 24/7 Sobriety Project is based on the electric fence or hot stove principle. Persons who touch an electric fence or a hot stove are penalized immediately with an electric shock or a burn. The sanction is not severe, but is immediate and certain. After being shocked or burned once, they will avoid touching the fence or stove a second time. The working group believed that 24/7 participants would respond similarly. After failing once and immediately spending a day in jail, they would stay sober to avoid being jailed a second time. Data gathered on participants showed positive results. Defendants who had not been sober for decades were reporting twice-per-day and testing clean. The working group was delighted by the results but faced certain difficulties.
To start, the pilot project only targeted drunk drivers. Three challenges soon developed and needed to be addressed. First, some defendants had legitimate excuses that precluded them from appearing at the test site twice-a-day; second, there was a need to test for illegal drugs in addition to alcohol; and third, the program needed to be expanded beyond drunk drivers.
SCRAM Bracelets
The pilot program worked very well when participants could get to the test site without difficulty twice daily. Participants with work-related problems often found it difficult to report to the test site at the scheduled times. Some had odd work schedules. Some lived 40 or 50 miles from the test site; this is commonplace in South Dakota. Many counties in South Dakota are so rural that the only law enforcement personnel are a sheriff and a deputy. In counties lacking the personnel to perform testing twice a day, defendants were issued SCRAM (Secure Continuance Remote Alcohol Monitoring) bracelets to monitor their alcohol and drug use.
SCRAM bracelets are battery operated devices worn on the leg. Every half hour, they collect and analyze wearers’ sweat gland emissions for the presence of alcohol. The accumulated information is remotely transferred to a modem attached to a landline telephone; the modem and bracelet communicate whenever they are within 40 feet of each other. The modem transfers the data via a daily telephone call to the vendor’s computer. The following day, the sheriff or probation officer receives an email indicating whether the wearer has stayed sober, consumed alcohol, cut off the bracelet, or tampered with the device. SCRAM bracelets have proven to be an effective alternative to twice-per-day testing. Bracelet wearers are not required to report to the sheriff except for device maintenance or in the event of a violation. South Dakota has nearly 400 bracelets in operation daily.
Testing for Drugs
The pilot program testers saw that regular testing and accountability could keep chronic DUI defendants sober for months at a time. But they also saw that some defendants were using marijuana, cocaine or methamphetamine as a substitute for alcohol. This prompted the implementation of a urinalysis testing program to randomly test twice-per-day alcohol participants for illegal drugs. The presumptive test works like an early pregnancy test kit and is sensitive for amphetamines, opiates, cocaine, marijuana and several prescription medications. Defendants with positive tests are immediately incarcerated and their urine samples are sent to the state laboratory for complete analysis.
The next challenge was to extend drug testing to rural areas lacking the personnel to administer tests. The simple answer was a sweat patch. Sweat patches look much like two-inch by three-inch adhesive bandages. They are worn on the defendants’ backs or upper arms for seven to 10 days and collect sweat gland emissions. When a patch is removed, it is mailed to a laboratory for analysis and replaced with a new one. The laboratory tests the patch for traces of controlled substances. Defendants wearing patches are only required to check in with the sheriff to change patches or in the event of a violation.
Expanding the Program
Once judges in pilot counties saw the effectiveness of the program on chronic drunk drivers, they decided to expand the program. Judges began placing defendants arrested for non-DUI alcohol-related offenses into the pilot program. They saw the immediate benefit of sobriety for defendants who had committed domestic violence, theft, burglary or assault while under the influence of alcohol. They saw similar results among persons arrested for drug related crimes who were free of controlled substances. At the request of these judges, the program was modified to incorporate regular drug testing. Because drugs dissipate at a slower rate than alcohol, twice-per-day drug testing was not required. Regular drug urinalysis testing could be administered twice per week. After implementing this change, however, the working group discovered that individuals being tested for drugs twice per week often switched to alcohol. To counter this, defendants appearing twice per week for drug testing were randomly tested for alcohol just as alcohol defendants were randomly tested for drugs.
Good Results
By December 2006, the pilot project had processed over 1000 DUI defendants with at least one prior conviction for DUI within the previous 10 years. Two-thirds of participants, tested for an average of 111 days, were 100 percent compliant. That is, they reported for testing every time and had a clean test. Seventeen percent of defendants failed once; less than 10 percent of defendants failed twice. Just six percent of defendants failed more than twice. The working group found these numbers to be remarkable because 48 percent of the pilot defendants had at least two prior DUI convictions. The apparent success of the electric fence and hot stove principle prompted the statewide expansion of the program.
In 2007, the South Dakota legislature authorized and funded the 24/7 Sobriety Project statewide effective July 1, 2007. The legislation authorized judges to impose 24/7 Sobriety conditions both pre-trial (bond) and post-conviction (probation), and permitted the parole board to conduct patch testing as part of parolee supervision. Juvenile court judges gained authority to place parents or adult caregivers of abused and neglected children into the 24/7 Sobriety Project as a condition of the children’s return when removal was related to drug or alcohol abuse. Today, the project operates in 57 of South Dakota’s 65 counties and covers over 90 percent of the state population.
Success Stories
The 24/7 Sobriety Project has demonstrated short term success. Hundreds of participants who had been drinking for decades now enjoy sobriety. One middle aged defendant had been in and out of jail on alcohol related charges for over 30 years. After several months of sobriety in the program, he told the sentencing court, “Judge, you are the first person in my life who told me to quit drinking and actually meant it.”
Another defendant was a woman in her mid-40s charged with her fourth DUI offense. When interviewed by a local TV station, she explained that because of her drinking, her husband had divorced her and her children had abandoned her. But she had now been sober for six months because she had been tested twice a day. When asked by a reporter if the 24/7 Sobriety Project had changed her life, she said, “Because I have been sober, I was invited to my son’s high school graduation. I was also invited to my daughter’s wedding. If I had still been drinking, I would not have been allowed to attend either of those events.”
The Numbers
We began twice-per-day testing for alcohol in three counties in February 2005. By December 2006, the pilot program was active in 12 counties. Today South Dakota operates a program which tests for both alcohol and drugs in over 90 percent of the state. A web-based reporting system stores the data in a central server housed in the Attorney General’s Office.
At present, over 1800 defendants are tested each day and nearly 11,000 defendants have been tested to date. With a failure rate of less than one percent, more than 99 percent of participating defendants report on time and test clean.
SCRAM bracelet numbers are also good. Seventy-eight percent of SCRAM bracelet wearers are “program compliant” and have not had a confirmed drinking event or removed or tampered with the bracelet during their 111-day testing period.
Ninety-eight percent of urinalysis test participants have tested clean. Ninety-two percent of sweat patches removed from participants have tested free of controlled drugs.
These numbers show that frequent testing, combined with accountability, can cause alcohol and drug dependent men and women to free themselves of alcohol and drugs, at least in the short term. To assess the long term impact of the program on sobriety, the state is tracking and continuing to collect data on the program’s participants.
There are encouraging signs. South Dakota lost 191 people in traffic fatalities in 2006. In 2007, the traffic death toll dropped to 146; in 2008 the death toll fell again to 121. In 2006, 67 South Dakotans died in alcohol-impaired auto crashes (alcohol-impaired is when at least one driver had a blood alcohol level of .08 percent or higher). That number dropped to 45 in 2007 and fell to 25 in 2008. The expansion of the 24/7 Sobriety Project was identified as one of several reasons for these declines.
The 24/7 Sobriety Project started in response to South Dakota’s increasing prison population. From FY1996 to FY 2006 the state’s inmate population grew by an average of 152 prisoners per year. In FY07, the population decreased by 50. In FY08, that number dropped another 34. South Dakota’s Secretary of Corrections identified the impact of the 24/7 Sobriety Project as part of the reason for these decreases.
The jail populations in the two largest counties in South Dakota have decreased since the 24/7 Sobriety Project was instituted. One sheriff even delayed a planned jail expansion because of the impact of the program on that facility.
Caveats and Conclusion
The 24/7 Sobriety Project is not a substitute for alcohol and drug treatment. However, the data suggests that participation in the program for several weeks or months prior to and after treatment will result in significantly longer successful treatment outcomes. So, if the state helps defendants remain sober and drug free for a time both before and after treatment, they will stay sober and drug-free much longer.
Many other benefits flow from introducing defendants to sobriety and freedom from drugs. Their families are safer. The community is safer. And each individual who maintains sobriety and drug freedom is removed from the criminal justice system. This reduces arrests, jail populations, and court time.
The 24/7 Sobriety Project works in South Dakota. It is being implemented in North Dakota and other states are considering it. Perhaps your state would benefit from a similar program.
This was probably written close to ten years ago.
From what I have read, Larry Long most likely still markets the program to state A.G.'s and counties. He is someone that I will contact before year end.
PCHM
