In February, the Mayor of Houston, along with police department officials, announced plans to fund the city’s first Sobering Center, designed to manage the more than 19,000 public intoxication bookings the city processes each year. Working in conjunction with a local treatment facility, the center keeps them safe, eliminates the costly booking process, and allows a touch point with a treatment person to assess each individual.
Amidst tight resources and budget cuts, law enforcement officers are diverted from handling more serious crimes when they have to spend time incarcerating individuals whose only criminal behavior is public intoxication. Additionally, Sobering Centers can provide cost savings. The City of Houston estimated that city jail operations cost $25 million per year with an estimated $4-6 million attributable to public intoxication cases. The City Council agreed earlier this year to spend $4.3 million to outfit a warehouse at the Star of Hope Mission in Houston, and spend $353,000 a year to operate it as a place to take folks who have had a few too many instead of jail. Groundbreaking took place in August.
While Sobering Centers are not new in relation to treatment centers and even big city hospitals, the funding of a center for law enforcement, and the ability of the offenders to avoid a criminal charge, garnered attention in 2012.
Houston City Councilman Ed Gonzalez told the Houston Chronicle earlier this year that, “We do not guarantee outcomes here. There’s nothing to say that we’re going to rehabilitate anyone, but the chances of removing them from the criminal justice system into a different model is more likely to be much, much more effective and likely to save taxpayers millions and millions of dollars over the course of the next few years.”
Of course, an additional benefit of Sobering Centers is keeping people off the roads who might otherwise choose to drink and drive. We think Law Enforcement-based Sobering Centers are a concept to watch in 2013.
