Pubdate: Mon, 10 Oct 2005
Source: Baxter Bulletin, The (AR)
Copyright: 2005 The Baxter Bulletin.
Contact: http://www.baxterbulletin.com/customerservice/contactus.html
Website: http://www.baxterbulletin.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/2860
Author: Janelle House, Bulletin Staff Writer
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/meth.htm (Methamphetamine)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/rehab.htm (Treatment)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/youth.htm (Youth)

COURT SYSTEM OFTEN DEALS WITH KIDS WHO ARE IN CRISIS

A 16-year-old boy is caught stealing compact music discs from 
neighborhood vehicles.

A 14-year-old girl repeatedly ditches school to meet with her 
18-year-old boyfriend.

Police raid a meth lab and remove three toddlers from the home.

According to Circuit Court Judge Gary Isbell, 90 percent of children 
like these who come before him in the District Juvenile Division are 
there because of their parents' failures.

"The simple answer is you can't be friends to your children. You have 
to be a parent," Isbell said.

Isbell is a 14-year veteran judge in the juvenile division of the 
14th Judicial District - which includes Baxter, Boone, Marion and 
Newton counties. Before that, he served as deputy prosecutor for 14 
years in Baxter County. He recently was voted Juvenile Judge of the 
year by the Arkansas State CASA (Court-Appointed Special Advocates) 
in Little Rock.

"There are parents who have not provided a proper example for their 
children, and there are parents who do not insist upon an education," 
Isbell said. "There are parents who participate in illegal activities 
or do not provide supervision appropriate to a child. I would say 
that 90 percent of my problems are parent-related in that they have 
not fulfilled the obligations of being a real parent.

"Sometimes it's because parents simply aren't capable of doing so; 
but more often it's because they choose, for whatever reason, to 
allow kids to just raise themselves or be friends with the kids and 
let the kids do whatever makes the kids happy."

Isbell says there are three basic divisions within the juvenile 
court: juvenile delinquents, families in need of services - or FINS - 
and dependency/neglect cases.

Juvenile delinquents are children who have violated the law in some 
fashion, he says. The crimes range from misdemeanors to felonies but 
do not include traffic offenses or game and fish violations. The 
court must find ways to both punish and correct juvenile delinquent 
behavior - through probation, supervision and sometimes detention.

FINS are cases in which the child and the family have issues 
requiring court intervention.

"Some deal with attendance at school, some deal with runaway behavior 
and some deal with destructive behavior," Isbell said. "There's just 
a multitude of things that can cause a family to come into court, and 
the purpose of that court then is not to punish or to correct - like 
in delinquency matters - but to try to find a way for the family to 
weather that storm and to become stronger as a result." Often, courts 
refer to these juveniles as "status offenders," or children who 
commit acts which are considered offenses merely because of the 
child's status as a minor, not because the acts themselves are criminal.

While delinquency and FINS cases look to the child's behavior, 
dependency/neglect cases focus solely on parental behavior. The child 
is an innocent victim.

"In those cases, the parent alone has done some act that renders a 
child subject to being placed in foster care or being removed from 
the home," Isbell said. "It could be anything from drug abuse by a 
parent to neglect of the child to physical abuse of the child."

Drugs and alcohol are a big part of that problem, he says.

"I think 70 percent of the cases are related mostly to drugs, some 
alcohol, but mostly drugs and mostly methamphetamine," Isbell said. 
"It's huge."

"The worse thing about it is that under federal law, and dependency 
and neglect court is uniquely guided by federal law, federal law says 
that after a child has been in court for 12 months, I have to be 
making permanency decisions about where that child's going to go. And 
there's not been a lot of people who have been successful in kicking 
the methamphetamine habit inside of a year.

"To get clean, perhaps the greatest motivation for somebody to get 
clean would be the salvation of their children or to get their 
children back," Isbell said. "But that drug has such an incredible 
drag on people. Even after they go into treatment, and they get done 
with the treatment and they come back into the community - their 
exposure to the same people and the same place and the same triggers 
that they had before are there, and their ability to resist is almost nil.

"And, there are a number of people who, for selfish reasons, are 
giving up their rights to their children because the drug has more of 
a hold on them than anything else."

The meth problem in the Twin Lakes Area is costing everybody, Isbell says.

"It's almost pandemic," he said. "Meth costs society in the 
incredible use of resources across the entire spectrum of the 
community: You have the cost of prison; then you have the cost of 
medical care; then you have the cost of the children who are in 
foster care; then you have the cost of treatment programs; then you 
have the cost to the children in developmental delays and 
deficiencies that have arisen since their parents were using."

But, Isbell says, there are success stories for some families who 
have been plagued with meth-related problems.

"We expect, and this is true across the board in all kinds of 
substance abuse, we expect people to relapse," he said. "The secret 
in my court is how do they deal with the relapse, whether or not they 
rekindle their efforts to quit or not.

"We have some people who have been incredibly successful," he said.

"You have to dwell on your successes to get you prepared to go to 
court every day, because if you just dwell on your losses, you'd just 
be overwhelmed."
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MAP posted-by: Elizabeth Wehrman