As problems with methamphetamine or \u201cice\u201d continue to plague the CNMI, now is the best time to establish a drug court in the Commonwealth, according to Associate Judge David A. Wiseman.<\/p>\n
Speaking before the Rotary Club of Saipan at the Hyatt Regency Saipan yesterday, Wiseman explained how a drug court works to help society.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe proposed Commonwealth drug court being pursued by the three branches of government will be a specialized, problem solving court that incorporates drug dependency treatment with intensive court supervision for qualifying defendants,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Over 3,000 drug courts are now established in the U.S. and all 50 states have at least one.<\/p>\n
According to Wiseman, drug courts are a drastic departure from traditional criminal justice. In such a court, the approach is non-adversarial as it focuses on long-term rehabilitation rather than immediate punitive or retributive punishment.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe concept of a drug court is based on the philosophy of reward and punishment and rewards are reserved for those who accomplish the goals that the drug court evaluators have established,\u201d Wiseman said.<\/p>\n
He said he is optimistic that the Senate will pass their bill this week with regards o establishing drug court after the House passed theirs weeks ago.<\/p>\n
\u201cOnce a drug court bill establishes, we\u2019ll have a team put together,\u201d Wiseman said.<\/p>\n
According to a data provided by Wiseman, drug courts reduce re-arrest or reconviction rates by approximately 8 to 26 percent on average and reduce crime as much as 45 percent more than other sentencing options.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
As problems with methamphetamine or \u201cice\u201d continue to plague the CNMI, now is the best…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[26,65,233,261],"class_list":["post-211463","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news","tag-cnmi","tag-house","tag-hyatt-regency-saipan","tag-rotary-club"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211463","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=211463"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211463\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=211463"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=211463"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=211463"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}