A Personal Op-Ed from Devon Anderson

Most people locally know me as the former Harris County DA - and like most big-city DA’s I fit the stereotype of a hard-charging, lock-em up prosecutor. But I wish more people knew about another aspect of my tenure: My devotion to recovery.

As DA, I started the First Chance marijuana program and the county’s first diversion program for those charged with felony drug possession. Making these treatment-over-jail programs work required a fundamental shift in culture at the DA’s office, but I came to view leading that change as one of the most important aspects of work as the county’s top prosecutor.

I wish I could say I always felt this way, but it took a number of years before I understood and embraced the concept that treatment solves problems that incarceration cannot. You might think I would have intuitively understood that coming from a family of alcoholics. However, I was oblivious, even to my own problem. From college on, I was a highly functioning heavy drinker who found many drinking buddies at the criminal courthouse in the first 12 years of my career as a prosecutor. When I was elected to the bench in 2005, I got into the habit of drinking every night after work with my husband Mike, who was also a judge. It was our way of decompressing.

...

Before I became a drug court judge, I had visited the dockets of some and was intrigued and amazed at the friendly atmosphere and the applause that would suddenly erupt from the clients in the audience. I had heard that the program seemed to be working. What I wasn’t prepared for was the life-transforming miracles that the program created day after day.