East Troy municipal judge creates program to help juvenile offenders
By Tracy Ouellette
Editor
It was 2012 when East Troy Municipal Judge Michael Cotter says he became increasingly frustrated with the juvenile offenders he was seeing in his courtroom.
“The straw that broke the camel’s back for me was when this mom came in and said I need you to help me with my son. He didn’t have a father figure in the home and she said ‘My son needs help, I need help,” Cotter recalled. “I put her in touch with Health and Human Services and they were able to help her and her son.”
Cotter says it wasn’t long after that he began wondering how he could get the kids he was dealing with real help with their problems instead of continuing to deal with them in municipal court time and time again.
“Municipal Court is non-criminal,” Cotter explains. “Truancy, smoking, underage drinking, disorderly conduct, fighting, that’s the type of thing I see. And repeatedly I could see a pattern where I wasn’t getting through to them at all and that’s when I got worried.”
From January 2012 until May of 2012, Cotter referred five juveniles to Health and Human Services wanting to make an impact on their lives instead of just collecting fines. Or sending the up the judicial ladder to Circuit Court on criminal charges.
Cotter says this led to the formation of the Juvenile SBIRT (Screening, Brief Intervention, and Referral to Treatment) program in East Troy.
“I went to Health and Human Services and said, ‘I need help, I need to do something’ and they’re the ones that came up with the screening, we started in January of 2013,” he says.
“The State of Wisconsin Department of Families sent an individual to help implement the SBIRT program for HHS to administer in municipal court. In January of 2013, HHS began sending one or two social workers to my court to administer SBIRT screening to all individuals who appear in my court. This screening focuses on alcohol and drug issues. HHS agreed to do this at no cost to the Village of East Troy,” Cotter wrote in a memo to the East Troy Village Board.
Cotter says he’s not out to save everyone; he knows that’s not possible, he’s very realistic about what he’s doing. “I’m not trying to save the world, my goal is to help one kid a year.”
But the first year of the program helped more than one local kid and Cotter’s pleased with the results.
“The really neat thing is Walworth County decided that the program was so successful in East Troy in 2013 that they’re expanding it to Elkhorn,” he says. “My real hope is the state picks it up and funds this and gets it implement in places like Milwaukee and Dane County so we can have larger numbers to show it’s really having an impact on kids.”
In January, Cotter spoke with Theresa Owens, executive assistant to the Wisconsin Supreme Court Chief Justice Abrahamson about the juvenile court program. Cotter says Owens was extremely interested in this program and he has been exchanging emails with her since.
“Ultimately, I hope to convince the State of Wisconsin that this is a good idea so they fund a pilot project and expand this idea,” he wrote in his memo. “I am using the Functional Family Therapy project that is currently going on in Milwaukee County as a model. Walworth County Health and Human Services started their Functional Family Therapy project a few years ago. The Joint Finance Committee discussed the Walworth County Functional Family Therapy project and budgeted over a million dollars to pilot a similar project in Milwaukee County.”
How it works
The way the program works is that when Cotter sees a juvenile in his court as part of the judgment, they are ordered to speak to a social worker with the Department of Health and Human Services with a parent or guardian.
“Making contact with the social worker is mandatory,” says Cotter. “But once there, they kid doesn’t have to speak if they don’t want to. Sometimes they don’t. It’s not often, but some people don’t like the program.”
However, most of the kids and families that do take advantage of the help offered do better, says Cotter.
“The social worker talks to parents and juvenile and then they go through the screening process, to identify issues, ask series of questions and self disclose their drug or alcohol use,” he says. “The social workers are trained to pick up on clues in their answers and then are able to decide whether or not they’ll offer services to the kids and families. These can include interventions, substance abuse counseling, family counseling and more.”
Cotter says over the course of the last year, the social workers he’s been dealing with have also identified behavior problems that contribute to many of the juvenile offenders troubles, especially anger issues.
“We added the GAIN screen to assist with anger and psychological issues because we found that some of these kids aren’t abusing drugs or alcohol but have other issues. The social workers have found there are anger issues at the root of the problem and these kids need help so they’ve expanded it this year to include screening for that as well.”
Cotter says he’s going to keep working with HHS to get the kids and families in his courtroom the help they need.
“These kids I’m dealing with are, 99 percent, good kids they just are making bad decisions, I want to keep them from criminal court, and now we’re getting a little traction,” he says.
