Berrien County’s specialty courts are funded for another year now that the Berrien County Board of Commissioners has accepted state grants totaling $422,000 to run them.
Berrien County specialty court manager Ellen Moore tells us the Drug Treatment Court, the Mental Health Court, and the Swift and Sure Sanctions Probation Program have been around for more than a decade. She says they seek to address the individual circumstances of some offenders who could avoid further involvement in the justice system with some help.
“They do have very clear sanctions for something like failing a drug test or not being where you’re supposed to be when you’re supposed to be there,” Moore said. “So, nobody’s getting easy breaks in any of these programs.”
Moore says the mental health court, for example, gets an offender with a mental illness into counselling and on the right medication. The idea is to keep them from repeated offenses.
“The people that we’re helping have a serious and persistent mental health diagnosis that we’ve confirmed. So, it really helps the community deal with things in a better way, if we can put around that person the professional support they need.”
The Drug Treatment Court is similar, seeking to help offenders get and stay clean so they don’t get into more trouble.
Moore says the Swift and Sure Sanctions Probation Program puts offenders who could have gone to prison with felony convictions on a strict probation regimen instead. At any time, around 100 are enrolled in that program.
Over the years, the Drug Court has seen around 140 graduates with a similar number of graduates from the Mental Health Court.
