Recovery Court – 3 Years and Going Strong!

By Emilie Parten, The Reporter On The Rove

What began as a vision for Navarro County District Attorney Will Thompson, has now been in circulation for over 3 years.

More than 18 months of planning and preparing, DA Thompson knew the program would take some time to implement. But, that did not slow him down.

Serving under the late R. Lowell Thompson, Thompson held the position of Assistant DA for 12 years before being elected and sworn into office in  January of 2021. However, in the 10 months during his campaign, before he was sworn into office, Thompson dedicated hours to traveling to various other counties with recovery programs, taking notes on their procedures and learning from their experiences to develop a program with the highest chance of success for Navarro County.

Counties with more than 250,000 people are required to have a recovery program and, in Navarro’s case, with more than half of its felony criminal cases having some relation to drugs, a program was a no-brainer. Thompson traveled to Galveston, Rockwall, Sherman, Kaufman Counties, just to name a few, in order to gather information on the best ways to implement and utilize a program to aid citizens and put them on the path to recovery. He wrote the rules and guidelines and pitched it to the Judges, both of whom were completely on board with the idea and Judge James Lagomarsino agreed to preside over the cases.

The Process

It all starts with a nomination made by the Prosecution, the DA or Probation officer. The nominee then goes to Homeward Bound who does an assessment which determines two things: whether the individual would be a good fit for the program and if they would start the program after a month in inpatient rehabilitation or if they could feasibly start the program without it. The assessment is given to the Defense, the probation officer and the State which must all agree to allow the individual into the program unanimously in order for the individual to start phase one.

The first phase is the most intense with weekly solo and group counseling and meetings with the probation officer, monthly recovery court meetings with the judge and daily calls to the probation office for a randomized drug test. Phase one last for a minimum of four months and requires a certain length of time without dirty drug tests, a set number of completed group and solo counseling sessions and at least half of their community service hours completed in order to graduate to the second phase.
The entire program takes no less than nine months to complete and an individual is given 18 months to graduate from the program.

The Success

Many successful cases have been reported and celebrated. The main thing that kept them on track was the daily calls to see if they would have a random drug test as the thing that kept them motivated to stay clean.

In the three years this program has been in place, it has had 22 participants, 11 of which graduated from the program and 5 of those graduates were in just this last year.

Thompson quoted Judge Lagomasino as saying, “If we save one person, it will be worth it.”

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