by Vivian Kinter
Drug Court and Mental Health Court are two of Allegheny County’s “specialty courts,” which purport to “divert” people from incarceration but usually require guilty pleas, long periods of probation, and/or inpatient treatment. This is one court watcher’s experience in these courtrooms.
The people coming to Drug Court Review buzz in wait, anxious because Judge Sasinoski is late. Many of them have plans after court, but because the judge has decided their time is not valuable, those plans are in jeopardy. The room was built to create every form of barrier between people to prevent any sort of empathetic interaction. The world is suspended in time, waiting for one man. Finally, he appears, and the room shifts to full speed. The judge spends less than a minute on each person before hurrying through the next. Everyone with a negative review is shuffled away, to a room out of our sight. It’s as if the judge sees not humans in front of him but barriers to be shoved aside so he can get to anywhere other than this doing anything other than this.
This is not a court room but a conveyer belt, a speed round of people’s lives into which we’ve been flung.
And then the round ends. Everything stops.
The first thing you see when you walk into Mental Health Court is a childish and, quite frankly, bizarre array of Star Wars Yoda plushies. This display of toys implies that this room is a safe and comforting place specifically for children. It’s not. This is where adults face Judge Lazzarra. But the tone and atmosphere feel more like a visit with a high school guidance counselor. Positive reviews include praise so enthusiastic it verges on demeaning, award certificates, and courage bracelets. It’s as if we’re at a science fair and everyone’s competing for the blue ribbon.
Adults walk into Judge Lazzara’s courtroom to seek assistance and agency, but to her they are helpless children in need of guidance only she can give.
Lazzara’s superlatives of praise seem not only to be her way of building people up, but also the vehicle for her favorite weapons: subtle jabs and hidden threats. A man stands before her, suffering and struggling after a relapse. She begins by expressing her disappointment with him, all the more accentuated when contrasted with the praise she’s tossed at every other person who has walked through the room. She is using this linguistic dichotomy to tear him down. If she can make him feel less than every other person in the room, she can use his shame as a form of coercion, so he’ll follow the script she wants him to follow.
Due to multiple failed drug tests, the man is being evicted from the program he was living in, and the court has two weeks to figure out what to do. Lazzara compares him and his actions to garbage, describing the program as “tossing [him] out,” She continues with a threat: “if you get tossed out, I have no choice but to jail you.” She uses this ultimatum to force him to publicly admit to an act that he is obviously ashamed of. He receives this emotional flogging in front of the entire court so he can go to an in-patient program instead of jail. Then he is surrounded and hounded by Judge Lazzarra, his lawyer, and the original program’s representative. Between their repetitive and rushed phrases about him ending up in jail, I cannot hear him actually admit to taking drugs, but I know it happens because the lawyer sitting behind him raises her hands in exasperation as if his life is a waste of her time. After everything has gone her way, Lazzarra falls back into the routine of praise, applauding him for doing the right thing. Everyone in the courtroom is being conditioned to do anything she says just to avoid her mood swings.
Neither of these approaches allows room for people in these courts to be treated with dignity or respect.
These two courtrooms are polar opposites in not only the setup but the treatment of the people. In one room, there is an impersonal, blatant disregard for people and their time; in the other, a mother looking after children. While some parts of each approach may seem to work for one or two people, the one-size-fits-all method means that, if it does not work for someone, it becomes their problem. Figure out how to make it work, fake it, or go back to jail.