INDIANAPOLIS — The strip of Interstate 74 that runs through rural Ripley County in Southeastern Indiana is known as “Heroin Highway.”
The name comes from federal drug agents who’ve identified the road as a pipeline for drug traffickers hauling goods from Cincinnati to Indianapolis.
In Judge Jeffery Sharp’s courtroom, it’s taken on a new meaning.
Increasingly, the intoxicant found in the blood of defendants charged with driving under the influence is heroin.
“It’s out of control,” Sharp said.
On Wednesday, the local judge traveled to the Statehouse to hear Chief Justice Loretta Rush deliver her annual State of the Judiciary address to the General Assembly. When Rush told lawmakers that Indiana’s drug crisis is flooding courts with defendants and sending a wave of children into the state welfare system, Sharp knew exactly what she meant.
In idyllic Ripley County, half of which is farmland, where unemployment is low and the biggest city has 6,500 people, illegal drug use is rampant. It is one the top three counties for heroin arrests on a per-capita basis, at quadruple the statewide average.
Of addicts who appear in his courtroom, Sharp said, “many, many are parents.”
Another part of Rush’s speech that resonated with Sharp was her plea to lawmakers, who may move to raise drug penalties, to focus dollars on rehabilitation.
“We cannot afford to incarcerate or institutionalize our way out of this drug crisis,” she said.
Sharp campaigned on the same message in a closely contested election in 2014.
Until he took office a year ago, Ripley was one a handful of counties in the state with no community based corrections program.
Court officials just hadn’t seen the need for options beside jail or prison. Heroin changed that.
Sharp, a former prosecutor, joined his local colleague on the bench, Judge Ryan King, in advocating for a program that aims to keep low-level, nonviolent drug offenders out of prison by steering them into court-supervised treatment. The program, still in its infancy, is not as well-resourced as they’d like, but it seems to be gaining support.
For example, Sharp needed employers willing to sign onto a plan to put drug defendants into work-release while in treatment. Many small business owners have cooperated.
“They’ll come to my court and say, ‘He’s a good worker, I don’t want to lose him,’” the judge said.
The goal of the community-based corrections, said Sharp, reflects what Rush called for in her address. She said: “Our approach must include helping sons, daughters, husbands and wives return to a life after addiction.”
Sharp concurs and sees part of his duty as helping return people to productive lives.
“Judges know, when you send somebody to prison, you’re making an individual unemployable,” he said.
It may not always work, given the nature of addiction. It’s not uncommon for defendants in the community corrections program to fail court-ordered drug tests.
“When that happens, it’s very disheartening,” he said.
But it also makes him more determined.
If he can find the funding, Sharp said his next project is to get a drug treatment program into the local jail, which could help offenders who’ve failed in the community corrections program or whose crimes, like burglary or theft, were committed to support a drug habit.
Few in the community question the need, he said.
“It used to be, if we had a heroin overdose here, it was a big story,” he said. “Now when it happens, it doesn’t even make the news.”