Dan Cronin Interview with Behavioral Health Central (cont.)
BHC: Give us an overview of what you plan to cover in your presentation at the Moment of Change Conference.
DC: In my private practice, I have an office in Pasadena, California. We do over 100 cases in the courts monthly, mostly in the Los Angeles area, but also all over the country, where we deal with people, families that have some kind of legal trouble based on substance abuse, alcohol, drunk driving. And what we like to do is we like to think that that worst moment when the handcuffs come on is [also] a moment for enlightenment and a time for us to be able to intervene and get somebody into recovery from that point of view.
BHC: So it really is the kind of the ultimately bottoming-out moment?
DC: Well, temporarily it is, and I think that’s the good thing about it. You need to act quickly when that moment happens, because people with substance abuse issues tend to have short memories of about just how bad that was when the handcuffs come on. So that is a window of opportunity for us to present a better option for them and for their families.
BHC: This is an intervention, then, that involves the court system as well as the individual and the families.
DC: Right. Typically, what will happen is we’re contacted either by the family directly or through the attorney, most likely, for somebody that we’ve worked with, and then we get together with the client and we do a clinical assessment. Based on the clinical assessment and the legal needs, then we’re able to devise a treatment plan, present it to the prosecutor and the judge, and try to turn something that’s a legal issue into a clinical issue and hopefully keep people out of incarceration.
BHC: How do drug courts play a role in this?
DC: Drug courts are typically an animal unto themselves. We get some of their overflow or we get people that aren’t really in drug court. Typically with a case like that it’s a pretty in-and-out situation — everything is pre-arranged. So we would get somebody who’s not in drug court or doesn’t qualify for drug court or we would get a case that a drug court is kind of frustrated with.
BHC: What are some of the major roadblocks you encounter as you try to kind of make this all work for the individual?
DC: I think that one of the major obstacles that we have is that when you’re dealing with lawyers — and judges and prosecutors are both lawyers — who campaign on the sentences, they’re trying to get a prosecution. The prosecutors are trying to get somebody prosecuted. That’s their only job. The judge is supposed to be the arbitrator in the middle. And what we’re trying to do is to get them to take a look at something and make a little shift, and understand that for these people, if they’re given the opportunity, recovery is a better option than incarceration.
You know one of our famous sayings is that there’s never been a judge or prosecutor that’s run on the platform of "soft on crime." There’s no judge in the country that wants to free somebody to go to rehab and then the next day go out and kill somebody in a drunk driving accident.
BHC: Are there mechanisms or arrangements that you can put in place that will ease everyone’s mind that that’s not likely to happen?
DC: Well, you want to try to build a solid case that a lawyer can read and say that these safeguards are in place. And I think one of the main things that they want to hear is that every time that we go into a court or go to court for somebody, they’re going to see that we’re putting our license on the line, and that we’re going to monitor the case for them, so therefore we can notify the court if something happens.
Obviously, not everybody is going to be qualified or eligible for this, but what we want to do is be able to make a convincing case that this person is either a low risk to re-offend based on clinical evidence, or that they certainly do have a problem and that given a structured treatment plan and follow-up through our office, they’re going to be less likely to re-offend at that point.
BHC: Are you finding courts and prosecutors trending towards agreeing more to these kind of relationships, or is it staying the same — or moving in the other direction?
DC: It is moving in the treatment direction. Unfortunately — or fortunately I guess for us and our clients — it’s really more economic-driven than [driven by] understanding the issues and accepting the clinical necessities of what we should be doing. So therefore, if we can make a presentation to a judge that this person is willing to go to treatment and that it’s not going to cost the county anything, then that’s one more prison bed that they don’t have to fill up. So I think that it is heading in that direction but not entirely for the purposes that we look at it. But which is okay with us, too, though.
BHC: Dan, are you typically contacted by the individual him or herself or their attorneys or their families? How do they get in touch with you?
DC: Well, it’s a wide variety, because we’ve done thousands of these cases and we typically work with lawyers. We’re typically contacted through the attorney, but we are also contacted through treatment centers who have people trying to go into treatment. One of the things that we are able to do quite a bit is if we get a call from a treatment center and they have somebody who is in custody and they can’t get out to get treatment, we’re able to help them successfully navigate that process from incarceration into their treatment center. So we work with treatment centers, we work with families that are looking for help, and with the attorney who refers them to us.
BHC: Dan, turning to some of your other work. You’ve worked over the years, as we mentioned in the introduction, with many high profile cases in entertainment and sports. Are there particular differences in the approach to an intervention and the approach to a treatment when you are dealing with a highly accomplished professional?
DC: Well, the real difference is when you’re dealing with people who are highly accomplished or people who have means is that the reality for them is that they haven’t hit bottom in the traditional sense, and they’re probably not going to hit that kind of bottom. They still have their wives and their girlfriends or whatever and they have their job or their career and they’ve still got their money in the bank. So for somebody in that position, what you really need to be able to access is quality-of-life issues.
BHC: Dan, public attention to intervention has skyrocketed in recent years thanks to programs like A&E’s Intervention and VH1′s Celebrity Rehab. Has that been good for the intervention profession, do you think, or has there been a downside as well?
DC: I think it’s probably a little bit of both. It’s been good for my business because the people I work with know that they’re never going to see me on one of those shows. So for the people that I work with, it’s fine, and for the common person, I think it’s good, too, because they really do get to see what an intervention is. And if you get a call from somebody now, they already have an idea of how an intervention works.
So, I think like anything else, it’s kind of this two-edged sword, but it’s helped me with my professional stuff better, because I’m not going to show up on television. And so confidentiality and client care is really [important], because the difference with high profile clients is that if somebody has a slip, or if you or I get a DUI, the only people who would know about it would be our families. But the people I work with, they’re in every major media market within hours. So, that’s kind of what the difference is.
BHC: Dan, turning back to legal intervention, our audience is largely behavioral healthcare treatment professionals. If someone is listening to this and they’ve got a situation where they feel that they could use help such as you provide, how can they access that help? I presume that you practice primarily in your local area?
DC: No, we practice nationally. We have lawyers all over the country that use us all the time. They can contact me at our office number in Pasadena, 626-568-1013. We’d be happy to confer with any professional, give whatever we can for assistance, and if they have a family that needs us, we’d love to have them give us a call and see what we can do for them.
BHC: Well, great. Dan I really appreciate you taking the time to speak with us today and best of luck with your presentation at the Moment of Change conference.
DC: Thank you very much.
