The past, present and future of Queens’ Treatment Courts

Judge Marcia Hirsch (left) is retiring and leaving Judge Jessica Earle-Gargan the reins of Queens’ Treatment Courts. Eagle photo by Ryan Schwach

By Ryan Schwach

In a courtroom at the far end of the third floor of Queens Criminal Court on Queens Boulevard, the New Yorkers who appear before it aren’t called “litigants” or "defendants," they are known as "participants."

Courtroom E-324, located on the far eastern corner of the Queens Boulevard courthouse, is home to Queens’ treatment courts, which aids its users in finding programming to overcome addiction and other issues, rather than go through the penal system.

In simple terms: treatment over incarceration.

For the last two decades, Queens Treatment Court has been presided over by Judge Marcia Hirsch, who came to the role in 2005 and has seen it grow in that time. This month, Hirsch is retiring, and is handing off the treatment court to Judge Jessica Earle-Gargan, who has spent much of the last few years in the court, and wants to grow it even further.

Queens Treatment Court includes a handful of parts, including the DWI Treatment Court, the Mental Health Court, the Veterans Court and the Drug Diversion Court, all of which push participants into programming to overcome the issues that landed them in court in the first place.

In 2005, when Hirsch first stepped into the role, the conversation behind the concept of treatment courts was still relatively new.

“There have been a lot of changes since then, we just had the drug treatment court, and at that point, we weren't even really talking about using medication for addiction treatment,” Hirsch told the Eagle at a wooden table in the center of Courtroom E-324.

Hirsch was recommended for the part because of her background in education as a school board member, and because of her work in her community on drug and alcohol addiction issues.

“They told me to stay for five years, and I'd probably really enjoy it,” she said. “Nineteen-and-a-half years and six court parts later, here I am.”

Over that time, Hirsch has seen the courts grow from a relatively infantile view on mental health and addiction treatment, to having treatment courts in all five boroughs and counties across the state.

Queens, she said, has been at the forefront of a lot of that work thanks to an interest from local district attorneys and court system leadership.

“We had such a supportive District Attorney's Office, and our administrative judges here have been fabulous,” she said, also mentioning now Chief Administrative Judge Joseph Zayas, who once presided over a drug treatment court in Queens.

Hirsch remembers that within her first year, then District Attorney Richard Brown’s office said they wouldn’t approve treatment courts for people who had committed violent crimes, which soon changed.

“By the end of the year, they came to us and said, ‘wow, we really think you're doing a great job. We're going to send you violent crimes now’,” Hirsch said.

Now, the court has expanded to take even more cases and more types of cases. For Hirsch, she has seen participants who 20 years ago would have cycled in and out of the justice system, Rikers Island and upstate prisons, now have a new lease on life.

“They would have cycled through Rikers like the criminal justice revolving door,” she said. “I think we stopped that to a degree for people who buy into the change, buy into the recovery, buy into treatment, buy into receiving mental health services, all of that. They really do make that meaningful change in their lives, and we see that firsthand.”

This year, facing mandatory retirement, Hirsch had to hand the the treatment courts’ reins over to Earle-Gargan, who has found a personal calling in the work of the treatment court.

“I do have an interest in problem solving courts in general, like domestic violence treatment,” she said. “So I was happy to get the assignment because I think it's an important one. I think it could be potentially the wave of the future.”

Both judges say the most rewarding part of the job is seeing the people who make it through the system change for the better.

“When you see someone who first walked in and they were in a very bad way, and you see them come in and they actually look healthy, maybe a little smile, and then seeing the reuniting with families is amazing,” said Earle-Gargan.

Both Judge Marcia Hirsch and Judge Jessica Earle-Gargan say the most rewarding part of their roles at treatment court is seeing the changes people make in their lives through the court. Eagle photo by Ryan Schwach

Every year, the courts hold a graduation ceremony for participants who have completed their treatment. This past June, the judges graduated eight participants.

Earle-Gargan said that just last week, a man making his way through the treatment courts told her about the impact it has had on him already.

"He's in his mid, late 60s, and he said, ‘In all my 60 years, I never said the system was working with me. They were always working against me, but the system's actually working with me’,” she said.

Presiding over the treatment courts has its own kind of challenges. While it is not as adversarial as an average criminal courtroom could be, the job comes with an added amount of advocating outside of the courtroom, and working all hours of the day.

“It's a tremendous amount of work,” Earle-Gargan said. “It's not work that you do from nine to five and then you go home. The emails are all night long when someone leaves a treatment facility. When you wake up and you see that one of your participants who was in a facility walked out in the middle of the night, you don't go back to sleep.”

Not only does it involve advocating for the participants, and pushing them into the right programs with the right resources to fit their needs, it's also advocating for fellow judges, attorneys and the DA’s office to recommend and approve treatment court for litigants.

“It can come from lots of different places,” Hirsch said, “It can come from the district attorney's office, it can come from a defense attorney. I've had judges on the eve of trial say ‘I didn't realize that this guy was a veteran. I think he belongs in your court,’ or ‘I didn't realize that this person had such a long mental health history with multiple hospitalizations, I think he or she belongs in your court’.”

There also comes the issues with time and resources.

“We recently had a case…It was a very violent case, and the person, I thought, really could benefit from mental health treatment,” Earle-Gargan said. “But given the nature of the crime and the seriousness, we had nowhere to send that person for treatment.”

“The person was too sick for the resources that we currently have within Queens County, so we had to send it back to a regular trial,” she added. “Sometimes you have to say no, because you don't want to set someone up for failure. “

Fixing those issues with resources is something both Hirsch and Earle-Gargan want to continue in their own ways.

Earle-Gargan wants to expand the court from the inside.

“We're looking into how to get more money through grants for the court, to get more resources, to get peers, to get things going,” she said.

She also wants to work to get people into the courts earlier in their legal process, which means more time to address the issues.

“I would like to try to facilitate bringing the people in earlier, getting the assessments done earlier,” she said.

The judge also has hopes of creating an alumni association for graduates to come in and meet with new participants .

“Sometimes it's very daunting,” she said.

Overall, both judges said there is always room for growth.

“I think I would like to get more resources from the city, from the state, so that we have more places to place people, specifically the seriously mentally ill, because, as it stands right now, if someone comes to us with only a serious mental illness, and I don't say only as if it's nothing, but no drug history, no alcohol history, we have nowhere to send them.”

The main hope is that the transition from Hirsch to Earle-Gargan will be a smooth one, since Earle-Gargan has spent the last several years in the treatment court.

“When there's a change in the judge in a treatment part, the efficacy rate of the treatment part drops,” she said. “But because this year, when I'm not out doing other stuff, or wasn't doing hearings somewhere else, I was here. So the participants that had been working with Judge Hirsch this year, they saw me. I'm not a brand new stranger.”

Earle-Gargan called the work Hirsch has done over the last two decades “tremendous.”

With retirement, Hirsch can relinquish the requirement to be apolitical that comes with a judgeship, and intends to fight for treatment court resources more freely.

“I am really looking forward to getting my first amendment rights back and being able to advocate a little bit more out there,” she said. “Being able to speak to legislators, and being able to speak to people in the community and really talk about the work that we do and to help support it financially.”

She also has time left on her term as the president of the New York Treatment Court Professionals, and plans to advocate from that role as well.

Thankfully, there is energy behind the change.

Last year, Chief Judge Rowan Wilson formed a Mental Health Task Force to help facilitate some of those efforts.

Hirsch is on that task force, and will continue to be post-retirement.

“It's going to be several years of work, because there's so much to be done there,” she said.

While Hirsch will continue that work, she called hanging up her robes “bittersweet.”

“It's hard,” she said. “When a normal judge leaves, they close their files, and the next judge takes it over, and there isn't that personal connection. I had like 80 people I had to say goodbye to along the way.”

“It's bittersweet,” she added. “It's been terrific.”