INDIANAPOLIS (AP) -
Indiana’s drug crisis is flooding its courts with a growing number of cases
and sending a surge of children into its welfare system, state Supreme Court
Chief Justice Loretta Rush told a joint session of the Legislature on
Wednesday.
During her second
State of the Judiciary address, Rush said the court’s five members heard
firsthand last year about the legal impact of drug abuse woes during visits
with trial court judges in all 92 Indiana counties.
"They shared with
us what became a recurring theme: the drug crisis, particularly heroin and
methamphetamine, crippling their communities and flooding their courts,” she
said.
Rush recalled Wayne
County Circuit Court Judge Dave Kolger saying that he sees heroin cases
daily in his eastern Indiana courtroom, but had handled only 20 in his
previous two-decade career as a prosecutor.
Another eastern
Indiana judge, Fayette County Superior Court Judge Paul Freed, had
“lamented” that his county of just 23,000 residents had 30 heroin overdoses
in only a month, she said.
Rush also said
Indiana saw a 30 percent increase last year in children entering its welfare
system - cases she said were “primarily because of parental substance
abuse.”
But Rush, who
became the court’s first female chief justice in 2014, also used her address
to trumpet the successes of Indiana’s drug courts, which keep low-level drug
offenders out of prison by taking part in court-supervised treatment
programs.
She introduced to a
standing ovation a southern Indiana woman, 28-year-old Lindsay Endris, who
turned her life around and overcame a heroin addiction through her
participation in Lawrence County’s drug court.
Rush said Indiana
is bringing the same drug court model that’s “about rehabilitation, not
punishment” to other parts of the state to help deal with drug abuse
problems and return people to productive lives.
“We cannot afford
to incarcerate or institutionalize our way out of this drug crisis. Our
approach must include helping sons, daughters, husbands and wives return to
a life after addiction,” she said.