Our Stories
Share the power of long-term recovery. If you are in recovery, a family member, friend or ally of someone in recovery, we want to hear your recovery story!
Learn more...
Faces & Voices of Recovery's book page
has information on many of the growing number of recovery-related publications. It’s a work in progress, so please let us know of other books that you think we should include. Check it out!
|
Recovery in the News
Home will focus on intervention
Stewart Warren
The Herald-News
January 17, 2010
On a raw morning in early January, Julie McCabe-Sterr limped to the back door of the house at Frank Avenue and Hickory Street. It was slow going. There had been a snowfall, and though most of the drifts had been cleared, the path was icy. McCabe-Sterr, 55, the coordinator of Will County’s drug court program, was somewhat handicapped: Recovering from a stress fracture to her right foot, she wore a clumsy orthopedic boot instead of a shoe — not the easiest way to to slop through a Joliet winter. But she didn’t seem to mind at all.
Unique in the U.S.
McCabe-Sterr was visiting the realization of a dream, the soon-to-be-opened Will County drug court recovery house. After years of planning, the county bought the house at 212 Frank Ave. near the end of last year. McCabe-Sterr drops by there at least once a day to make sure everything is OK and to work on getting it ready for the March or April arrival of the first six residents.
The place is more than her pet project. It’s the first and only facility of its kind in the country, according to Christopher Deutsch, spokesman for the National Association of Drug Court Professionals.
“There might be one out there, but we are not aware of one anywhere else,” he said.
As McCabe-Sterr worked on the project, a group of neighborhood residents opposed the plans. They were worried about having recovering drug addicts nearby. That’s typical, Deutsch said. Some people think addicts can’t get clean, that someone should lock them up and then lose the key, Deutsch said. But that’s not so.
“What drug court does is that it returns people back to the community as productive citizens who are committed to service and to being citizens,” Deutsch said. “I have talked to drug court graduates who say they are proud to be paying taxes for the first time.”
And that’s why the project is so important to McCabe-Sterr. She believes in the possibility of transformation.
Place for independence
After unlocking the home’s back door, McCabe-Sterr stepped in the kitchen. She stood there for a few minutes, smiling at the Shaker-style maple cabinets with the gleaming granite counter. The previous owners installed them before putting the home up for sale.
Then she walked into the large space set aside for the living and dining rooms. McCabe-Sterr laughed a little as she told the story of the china cabinet sitting against one wall. Its drawers were missing.
When the house was on the market, the owners sold the cabinet and the matching dining room table. The buyer hauled away the table and the cabinet’s drawers — but for some reason, never returned for the actual cabinet. So at some point, she’d probably have to haul it to the curb, but until then, it was fine where it was, McCabe-Sterr said.
“When I look at it, I can see where the dining room should be,” she said. “I’ll put a table here where they can have their dinners.”
From practically her first day on the job, McCabe-Sterr has wanted to open a recovery home with beds reserved just for the people in the program. It would be a place for them to live for about three months near the end of their time in drug court.
Although the residents would be supervised, they also would have responsibilities around the house and jobs outside of it, giving them a taste of the sober life in a regular neighborhood.
“The intent is to get them back on their own. They need to learn to be independent,” McCabe-Sterr explained, pausing on her trip through the basement to make sure the pipes weren’t frozen.
Drug court program
McCabe-Sterr vows to make the program a success, not only for the residents, but for the other people who live in the little neighborhood.
Established more than 10 years ago by Will County Judge Stephen White, Will County State’s Attorney Jim Glasgow and others, drug court is an alternative to prison or jail for nonviolent offenders with drug problems. To be chosen for the program, there must be a relationship between the crime a person committed and their addiction. The people in drug court — McCabe-Sterr calls them clients — typically have been arrested and charged with crimes such as theft, forgery or prostitution.
If admitted to the program, defendants stay there for at least a year. In the beginning, they appear weekly in front of Will County Judge Carla Alessio Policandriotes. She tracks their progress as they complete various tasks, including finishing high school, finding a job and doing community service, among other things. Lateness or absence means a trip to jail or prison. Participants are randomly drug tested and must undergo counseling.
It’s tough, to be sure. But the program changes lives.
Close relationships
More than half of McCabe-Sterr’s clients spend some time in a recovery home. But for many years, McCabe-Sterr and their staff have had a problem: there simply aren’t enough of those houses in Will County. Some of the people in drug court would be sent to cities such as Aurora, Addison or Oak Park to live. The distance was difficult.
“Then they are far removed from drug court and their case managers,” McCabe-Sterr said. “It’s harder for them to feel connected to the program, and it is harder for us to continue to give them the tools that they need to succeed.”
The relationships formed in drug court are one reason the program works, she explained. The clients know they can call McCabe-Sterr and her staff at any hour. Some call three times a day. They can visit the program’s offices unannounced. They get to know Policandriotes, and the judge truly cares about them.
“We become their parents,” McCabe-Sterr said. “They feel a connection to us, they feel accountable to us. So they would feel that they let us down if they relapsed.”
Funding, bed shortage
There are some treatment facilities in Joliet. Stepping Stones helps people with substance abuse problems and has short-term and extended stay housing, said Pete McLenighan, executive director. But there is a bed shortage in Will County, he said, echoing McCabe-Sterr.
“It really comes down to a lack of public funding,” McLenighan said. “Government funding typically does not match the demand for it.”
In fact, Stepping Stones recently lost $179,000 in state funding, so it is short one case manager. Now the wait for out-patient treatment has gone from 30 to 90 days.
As of mid-December, there were 170 people on the list for beds at Stepping Stones, McLenighan said.
“The average wait for an uninsured person for intensive residential treatment — the most frequently requested level of care — is 39 days,” he said. “The average wait for an uninsured person for outpatient treatment is 90 days.”
That can be a tragic gap — a woman recently called McLenighan to say that her son fatally overdosed while on the waiting list.
Lessons in a new home
Although this is McCabe-Sterr’s first Will County recovery home, it’s not her first ever. During her long career in social work, she’s opened them in other states. In 1975, she earned a bachelor’s degree in social work from the University of St. Francis. After graduation, she decided to follow friends to Charlottesville, Va., where she landed a job with Albermarle County as an counselor for children.
“They wanted to set up a program for pre-delinquent adolescents — these were adolescents that had interaction with the law, but no criminal offenses yet. And they needed housing,” she explained.
They established group homes for boys and girls, eight beds in each one.
“I got to participate in that from the ground up,” she remembered. “We set up the programming and did everything from picking the pictures on the walls to picking the kids that came into the house. It gave me a real feel for the need to make these kids part of the community.”
Because of their families, some of the children had never seen the ocean, although it wasn’t far away, she said. Others had never been to a library or a park. They didn’t know about the importance of an education or how to find help when they needed it.
“If you have not been taught that at home, someone else has to teach you how to do that,” she said.
Creating roots
Later, she moved to northern California and worked at the Ming Quong Children’s Center, a residential treatment facility in Los Gatos for the emotionally disturbed.
As a counselor and supervisor, she worked with the children on the large property in the city’s foothills. She also helped create a residential program outside the compound for older children. She prepared them for independent living, helping them learn how to take a bus from one place to the next, for example. Although these children were living in the community, they still had access to the resources of the larger Ming Quong facility.
“And that is the thing with drug court and the drug court house. We want our people to feel connected to the drug court staff, the team and the program,” she said. At the same time, they have to learn how to be a part of the community while staying clean and sober.
“I know it is hokey to say you give your kids roots so they can grow wings, but that’s what we’re trying to do. We try to give them all the tools they need to do it on their own,” McCabe-Sterr said. “While they are practicing those skills, they are in the recovery home, where they can still hang on to us.”
‘Sister Mary Bleeding Heart’
After California, she returned to Joliet to help her family. Her mother was ill, and her father needed help with the family business, a moving company.
But eventually she returned to her original career, landing a job as the social worker at the Will County jail. She stayed there for 15 years, long enough to do plenty of good works and earn a few nicknames.
“They called me Sister Mary Bleeding Heart, patron saint of the liars and losers, guardian angel of the hookers …,” she said, laughing. “Judge White just called me Miss Goody Two Shoes.”
When Glasgow returned to office in 2004, she made a cold call and asked for the job running drug court. He promptly hired her. Glasgow also backed the idea of a recovery house for drug court.
“Jim gave me my chance, and he let me run this program and dream my dreams — and supported me through all of it,” she said.
The county’s house
Almost immediately, she started floating the idea of a house, talking to Glasgow, White and Will County Board Member Ann Dralle, R-Lemont, who heads the judicial committee.
“What they said is, if you can figure out a way that drug court can do this, and you can show us that it will actually save the county money, then we will work with you to make it happen,” McCabe-Sterr said.
At that point, McCabe-Sterr’s plea was often emotional.
Dralle urged her to concentrate on the benefits to the county, a move that bolstered her pitch. Without Dralle’s help, the project never would have happened, McCabe-Sterr said.
“What we found was, when drug court clients are successful, they spend fewer days in jail, so it is cheaper to send them to drug court than to incarcerate them,” McCabe-Sterr said. It costs taxpayers $3,000 for someone to spend a year in drug court versus $25,000 for the same amount of time in jail, she said.
She eventually persuaded the county board to add a $10 fee to all Will County criminal cases and then set the funds aside for drug court.
“So by living very frugally, picking up bread crumbs as I walked through the forest, I saved that money in hopes that we would also have a recovery home,” she said, joking a little.
She’s still doing things the same way. McCabe-Sterr is doing much of the work at the Frank Street home herself, despite the fact that she’s hobbling around with a stress fracture. She has sorted through the things the previous owners left behind, bagging up old clothes to give to charity while saving anything the new residents might be able to use.
She’s asking friends and colleagues to help, soliciting donations of pots and pans, sheets and furniture. And next year, she plans to dig a garden in the large backyard. Every home needs one, she said.
She’s treating the house as if it were her own. But that’s not how she sees it.
“I think of it as the county’s house, not just the drug court house. I think it belongs to all of us,” she said, smiling again. “I think it will make a difference in a lot of people’s lives.”