Pubdate: Mon, 04 Mar 2002
Source: New York Times (NY)
Section: National
Copyright: 2002 The New York Times Company
Contact:  http://www.nytimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/298
Author: Fox Butterfield

BIG CITY IDEAS FIGHT SMALL TOWN CRIME

IDAHO CITY, Idaho, March 1 -- It all started when Bill London, a state game 
warden, stopped a man for fishing illegally in a pond in this rural, 
mountainous area north of Boise and found he had a ball of methamphetamine, 
the size and color of a Ping-Pong ball.

Mr. London did not like it that some of the drug dealers who have invaded 
rural Idaho in the last few years were hanging out at the pond, spoiling 
the fishing for families. So he went to the local judge, Patricia Young, 
who was looking for new ways to combat the spread of drugs, violence and 
poverty in her county. They came up with a plan: instead of sending people 
with minor criminal charges to jail, the judge would sentence them to fix 
up the pond.

Some contractors caught poaching elk had to donate their time and heavy 
equipment to build a sand beach beside the pond. People stopped for drunken 
driving were ordered to plant trees and flowers and water them with buckets 
carried by hand from the pond. Others were ordered to build a volleyball 
court and a sheltered picnic bench. The Idaho Department of Fish and Game 
deepened the pond and restocked it. The fishing was so good and the pond so 
attractive that "the dopers left and the sportsmen and families came back," 
Mr. London said.

But in helping to drive off the drug dealers, and in introducing a panoply 
of other programs, Judge Young has put into practice some of the most 
talked-about ideas in criminology, theories like problem-solving policing 
and community justice, which were developed in and for big cities.

Her innovations have occurred at a critical time, as many parts of rural 
America are experiencing a drug epidemic and rural law enforcement 
officials find themselves too few in number to stop it.

"Just making more arrests isn't going to work," Judge Young said, sitting 
in her old redbrick courthouse, which was built in the 1870's in Idaho's 
gold rush, when Idaho City was briefly the largest settlement in the 
Pacific Northwest. Her county, Boise County, covers almost 2,000 square 
miles, most of it national forest, with its three small towns separated by 
a narrow mountain road that is often closed by snow in winter. There are 11 
sheriff's deputies for 6,670 residents, and sometimes only one deputy is on 
duty.

"We simply can't find and arrest all the addicts and dealers, so we have to 
engage other members of the community if we want to create a safer and 
healthier county," Judge Young said. She has come to emphasize prevention, 
drug treatment and community justice, getting victims and defendants to 
agree on punishment, usually a combination of fines and community service, 
ideas she learned about after winning a grant from the federal Justice 
Department to help rural areas.

"What is important is getting a sense of local ownership, so that people 
who come to court feel they have a say in sentences, and they start to do 
things like protect the pond from drug dealers," she said. "We're still 
small enough that this works."

Judge Young has pushed particularly hard for programs that help newborns 
and children. "If we can't arrest all the dealers, we've decided to start 
at the beginning," she said.

One program sends a nurse to visit every new mother at home, delivering 
baby blankets and toys while assessing the family's situation. First-time 
teenage mothers get special attention, with a trained home visitor checking 
in once a week to offer advice and watch for possible child abuse or neglect.

Trudy Jackson, the owner of Trudy's Restaurant in Idaho City, runs a 
network of volunteers who contribute things like clothes, blankets and 
refrigerators for poor families with children, some of whom live in 
isolated hollows. These areas provide good cover for cooking meth. Ms. 
Jackson says helping people out of poverty is a way to prevent the spread 
of drugs.

Judge Young also helped get financing for universal preschool starting at 
age 3 in Boise County. Each family that participates gets a monthly home 
visit by a trained volunteer. Since the program began three years ago, the 
results have been encouraging, said Jamie Sims, an administrator and 
teacher at Idaho City's elementary school. Of the participating children 
now in kindergarten, 60 percent scored at grade level or above on Idaho's 
standard reading test, Ms. Sims said, compared with 25 percent of those who 
did not participate.

Not everyone likes what Judge Young is doing. Capt. Steve Bowers, the chief 
deputy sheriff, said his officers complain that "our judge doesn't really 
think drugs are illegal" because of her penchant for alternative sentences. 
This reduces the officers' incentive for making drug arrests, Mr. Bowers 
said. But a number of residents, including Ms. Jackson and Ric Call, owner 
of Diamond Lil's Saloon, next to the courthouse, said the sheriff and his 
deputies were simply not interested in going after drug dealers and meth 
cookers.

"It's my single biggest gripe with the sheriff, that he doesn't do 
something about drugs," Mr. Call said. "There's an attitude here of 'leave 
me alone'; it's the old frontier thing."

Drugs have spread so widely, Mr. Call said, that he and other small- 
business owners in town have a hard time finding reliable employees.

Even Captain Bowers speaks with a certain fatalism about drugs that 
officers in other rural areas also express. "It's so frustrating," he said, 
"that we kind of resign ourselves to the fact that we're not in a position 
to do much."
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MAP posted-by: Terry Liittschwager