Drug Treatment Grants to Prosecutors passed by Senate but stopped by House-Senate conferees

Legislation establishing a new program of federal grants to local prosecutors to establish Drug Treatment Alternatives to Prison programs was passed by the U.S. Senate in 2002, but deleted from the final bill enacted.

Under the Senate-passed measure, prosecutors would use the money to hire additional staff, and make subgrants to licensed treatment providers for the treatment services. Prosecutors would have the power to decide whether a defendant can participate, whether they "successfully complete" treatment, and whether they have "absconded" or "otherwise violated the terms and conditions" of treatment. The treatment provider is required to make treatment "progress reports" to the prosecutor, who has an "enforcement unit" with the power to terminate treatment and mandate incarceration.

The grant program was contained in section 2201 of the Senate's version of a bill authorizing programs for the Department of Justice, H.R. 2215. The House-passed version of the bill had no such provision, so the question of whether to include the program, and in what form, was up to House-Senate conferees.

NLADA proposed that if this provision was to be retained in the bill, it should be opened to defender agencies, as well as giving prosecutors less control over the course of treatment. NLADA drafted a substitute version of the legislative provisions establishing the program, as well as a fact sheet containing examples of existing defender programs doing DTAP-type work, to make the case that defenders as well as prosecutors should be eligible for grants.

If this type of balanced grant program was not possible, NLADA urged that the prosecution-only program be simply deleted from the bill. This was ultimately the course that the conferees chose. The bill was signed into law on November 2, 2002, as P.L. 107-273.

Other provisions included in the DOJ authorization bill as enacted are: a $350 million authorization for Juvenile Accountability Block Grants for which indigent defense programs are expressly eligible; an authorization of training and technical assistance grants to public defense and other agencies working with juveniles charged in delinquency proceedings; a federal reentry program; a modest $15 million in grants for state reentry programs; an authorization for drug court grants to states; and a federal rules change requiring pretrial disclosure to the defense of expert testimony relating to the defendant’s mental condition.

The proposed grant program to prosecutors is expected to be reintroduced again in 2003. NLADA will monitor the situation and respond as necessary.

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