Prosecutor Offers A Reason For Pilot Program’s Slow Start

An experimental pre-arrest diversion program is off to a slow start in New Haven in part because the city already doesn’t put people in jail for low-level drug offenses.

That perspective was offered on Tuesday night by David Strollo, New Haven’s chief state prosecutor and one of the key players involved in the city’s new Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion (LEAD) pilot program.

Strollo was one of around 40 New Haveners to show up for an hour-and-a-half-long LEAD community leadership team meeting held in the second-floor library at John C. Daniels School of International Communication at 569 Congress Ave.

LEAD aims to steer people arrested for low-level offenses to help rather than jail. It is patterned on similar programs in other cities. The program uses the carrot of avoiding jail to convince people to seek help they need.

Here in New Haven, Strollo said, those arrestees usually don’t end up behind bars.

“Part of the culture of New Haven is, there’s not really a jailable offense that they’re worried about,” Strollo said in explaining why only two people so far have opted into the voluntary program instead of being arrested. LEAD is designed to redirect people engaged in low-level drug offenses and prostitution away from the criminal justice system and towards a suite of substance abuse, mental health, housing, and employment social services.

Tuesday night’s meeting was the first public community engagement meeting that the local organizers of LEAD have held since the pilot program officially launched in Nov. 2017.

The middle school library was filled with the city and state officials and local health providers who have been administering the program over the past year. Those included Strollo, city Community Service Administrator Dakibu Muley, LEAD Project Director Cynthia Watson, state Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services (DMHAS) Assistant Director Loel Meckel, LEAD Enagement Specialist Monica Givens from Columbus House, and Cornell Scott Hill Health Center’s Ben Metcalf and Daena Murphy.

The meeting was also well attended by a cohort of local social justice activists and Yale law and public health students who have been outspokenly critical of the program’s rollout, particularly during a late September teach-in where they slammed the program’s administrators for failing to prioritize community engagement and transparency.

“We’re backpeddling initiating the community piece now,” Watson admitted during her opening presentation on the history and purpose of LEAD. ​“Yes, it should have been done before. We just have to move forward with what we have now. It’s kind of a lesson learned. We can only move forward. Today, this is when the clock starts ticking.”

Click on the Facebook Live video below to watch Watson’s opening presentation on how LEAD originated in Seattle and how New Haven’s pilot program is currently structured.

After Watson’s presentation, the Yale students and LEAD community watchdogs jumped in with a series of questions about why the program is structured the way it is, and why it has gotten off to such a slow start.

“Why does confidential information related to drug use and mental health history need to be turned over to the police and prosecutors in order for people to get case management services?” asked third-year Yale law student Devin Race.

LEAD Engagement Specialist Monica Givens said that no participants are required to share any personal information about their mental health or substance abuse histories with the police in order to participate in the program. She said that information is only shared if participants sign a consent form and explicitly agree to release the information.

Race followed up with a question about what protections are in place, if any, to keep that personal information from being misused by the police if, for example, a participant has an outstanding substance-abused related charge unrelated to whatever incident precipitated his or her engagement with LEAD in the first place.

“It’s not some sort of Orwellian thing where officers now have the most detailed information about your life,” Cornell Scott Hill Health’s Ben Metcalf said. ​“It’s meant as a means for us to be able to communicate, ​‘How can we assist this person who has these issues? Where can we meet them, and what sort of resources are available?’”

DMHAS Assistant Director Loel Meckel said that, 20 years ago, he too would have been skeptical that the police and state prosecutors could be trusted to advocate for substance abuse offenders to receive treatment rather than prison time.

“The biggest proponents for what we’re doing are from people in the criminal justice system,” he said. ​“These people really want the best for the people they’re helping.”

Yale second-year law student Stephen Andrews asked why so few of the city’s LEAD participants have come through social referrals rather than from pre-arrest diversions.

So far, 43 participants have come through social referrals, which result from a police officer or a community member recommending a person participate in the program even before that person has committed any substance abused-related criminal offenses.

Only two participants thus far have entered the program through pre-arrest diversions, meaning that they opted into the program after being picked up by a police officer for a substance abuse-related offense and being presented with two options: arrest or LEAD.

That’s where Strollo stepped in. The state prosecutor said that one big reason why so few people have opted into the program after being picked up by an officer for a substance abuse-related offense is because, in New Haven, people simply don’t go to jail for low-level drug offenses.

“They know New Haven is incredibly liberal,” Strollo said about offenders who turn the program down in favor of being arrested and going to court. ​“We don’t put people in jail for drug use until it gets to a point where there’s no other options.”

He said that, more often than not, people arrested for low-level drug charges are told by a judge that, if they plead guilty, they’ll get a non-conditional discharge and be immediately released with no jail time.

Strollo said that another reason why so few pre-arrest diversions have taken place thus far is that New Haven’s criminal justice system functions in a fundamentally different way than Seattle’s by virtue of Connecticut not having county government and not having prosecutors available 24 hours a day.

In most parts of the country, Strollo said, after the police make an arrest, the offender is sent to the prosecutor’s office, where the prosecutor takes up to 30 days to decide whether or not to send the case to court.

In Connecticut, he said, people who are arrested are immediately given a summons to go to court, thereby skipping the prosecutor’s potential capacity to screen cases before they appear before a judge.

“We can throw the case out once it starts,” Strollo said. ​“But we can’t stop it from going to court.”

As a state prosecutor, he tries instead to divert the offender from further engagement with the criminal justice system once that person is already in the courthouse, as opposed to at the street level once that person has been arrested.

He said that his courthouse is currently engaged in a state-mandated early screening initiative pilot program, whereby the prosecutor and a social worker work in tandem to identify people who have been arrested for charges related to substance abuse or mental health. If a person agrees to work with that social worker to get substance abuse treatment, he said, he as prosecutor will agree to throw out a case even before it appears before a judge.

He described that workflow as ​“court diversion” or ​“prosecutorial diversion” rather than the street-level pre-arrest diversion championed by LEAD.

“What we’re seeing is social referrals have been the main thing because people don’t fully realize what the LEAD program really does on the street,” he said. ​“This [LEAD] is something that could have a lot of effect. I hope that the word gets out so that they don’t even have to go to the court house.”

But if people do, he said, there are court-diversion programs already in place to redirect low-level drug offenders away from prison time.

Watson said that the next LEAD community engagement meeting will take place in November at John C. Daniels school. At that meeting, she said, she hopes to help form an actual community leadership team that will operate in parallel to the local LEAD program’s current policy team and operational team. She said that she also plans to have a community member appointed to the policy team at the next meeting.