Video Summary. Whether you are an Offender, Attorney, Judge, Probation Officer, Police Officer, or a Provider, this seven (7) minute movie could change your life. Judge Steven Alm explains how the HOPE Program works to his packed courtroom.
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From the Los Angeles Times:
The first thing you notice about 1st Circuit Judge Steven Alm is how excited he is about what he’s doing. The buzz-cut, fast-talking judge was waiting for me in the lobby of the courthouse early on a recent morning and led me up to his third-floor chambers to explain Hawaii’s promising approach to repeat offenders with drug and alcohol problems.
I’d heard about Alm’s program, Hawaii’s Opportunity Probation with Enforcement (HOPE), from two Southern California drug policy professors — Mark Kleiman at UCLA and Angela Hawken at Pepperdine — who urged me to go have a look at Alm’s operation. The results, they said, have been promising enough to inspire more than a dozen copycat programs around the country, and the professors believe that broader implementation could save the country billions of dollars in incarceration costs and redeem lives too.
Alm, who served as Hawaii’s U.S. attorney from 1994 to 2001, became a judge in 2001 and saw the same systemic problems he’d dealt with as a state prosecutor in the 1980s. Defendants were churned through a chaotic system that let some off the hook repeatedly, threw the book at others, reformed too few people and cost taxpayers way too much money. The vast majority of these burglars, robbers, sex offenders and other common criminals had drug and alcohol problems that figured into their habitual misdeeds.
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Additional Videos. Below are additional video clips about the program.
