Tell me, what else should I have done? Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
-- from "The Summer Day," by Mary Oliver
Everyone knows what's about to happen to Milton Allen. It's a Wednesday morning in June, and Allen, the middle-aged, cocaine-addicted son of a once-prominent Baltimore prosecutor and judge, has just taken a familiar seat at the defendant's table in the city's Drug Treatment Court. He's broken one promise too many, and this time he'll pay.
His attorney, assistant public defender Cindy Mossman, chats quietly with him. His disappointed probation agent, Paul McGowan, slumps in a wooden chair a few feet away. Laura Brokaw, an assistant state's attorney, appears more somber than usual and picks through a stack of yellow files on the prosecutor's table. As the judge assigned to this unique court, Gale Rasin, reads the progress report on Allen, there's no trace of the cheerful countenance she presents to many of the drug addicts who come before her, in various stages of recovery, each week.
On this day, Rasin won't be handing Allen a red, plastic "step pen," a token reward she gives defendants who stay clean for 90 days. She won't be declaring Allen "on the A-team," and asking everyone in the courtroom to applaud him for another good report card.
Milton Allen, 46, is a Drug Court failure, and the frustration is palpable among all parties assembled in Courtroom No. 2 in the District Court building on Wabash Avenue in northwest Baltimore. Allen was a good candidate for Drug Court -- a man with a problem who needed help, not punishment -- but he didn't hold up his end of the deal. So he's about to face the consequences, and no one in the courtroom takes particular satisfaction in this. In fact, there's a kind of sadness and mild angst about the whole thing, the feeling of relatives struggling with a draining problem around a kitchen table.
Drug Court is an unusual -- and unheralded -- place in the realm of criminal justice. There's a family-therapy aspect to the court's proceedings; they are more personal, more intimate than those of traditional courts. The stories are less about crime and justice than about human struggle and redemption. Some leave you despairing for the future of Baltimore. Some give you hope. All cases, especially the losers like Milton Allen's, affirm the depth and formidability of the city's drug problem.
