Court aims to keep families together (Indiana)

By Deb McKee
The Tribune-Star

The number-one goal of Vigo County’s new Family Drug Court is to keep families together despite drug addictions that might otherwise tear them apart.

Since September, a team of mental health and substance abuse treatment centers, the Juvenile Justice Center, the public defenders’ office and the Vigo County office of the Department of Child Services have combined resources to provide a new judicial concept for families facing child neglect or abuse charges because of drug addiction.

Before the Family Drug Court, a drug-addicted parent whose child was born with drugs in their system or whose child had been abused or neglected would lose their children, sometimes forever.

Magistrate Paulette Stagg, the presiding judge of the juvenile court in Vigo County since 1995, says the new court was developed after the justice system began to notice a skyrocketing number of families in need of state intervention.

“Newborns were testing positive for meth and being taken from their mothers,” she said. “When those parents go to regular court, we only meet with them once every six months. Mothers were abandoning their children, who were then put into foster care.

“We felt we were losing the battle,” Stagg said. “We knew we had to do something about this.”

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