By Cheryl Splain, KnoxPages.com Reporter
MOUNT VERNON — The Mount Vernon Municipal Court and the Knox County Court of Common Pleas are working together to reduce the cost of drug testing, free up jail space and provide an alternative treatment option for minor felony offenders.
Dave Priest, chief probation officer for the municipal court, said that new equipment the court plans to install to improve its drug testing capability is available for use by the common pleas court.
“Right now, we have a basic thumbs up, thumbs down [system that gives] either a positive or negative result,” he said. The new Indiko Plus system offers greater accuracy: It provides drug levels in nanograms, more specific blood alcohol concentration levels than a breathalyzer and checks creatinine levels to make sure the sample is pure.
Currently, offenders have to continually be re-tested until the test comes back negative. With the nanogram specificity of Indiko Plus, Priest said that “if the nanograms are going down, you know they’re trying to work some program of sobriety.”
The current test costs $1.75 and tests for six substances. Once a baseline test establishes which substances are present, a re-test specifically for that substance can be done at a cost of 57 cents. Priest said the municipal court conducts around 420 drugs test a month.
“The great thing is this partnership doesn’t have to stop between the two courts,” said Priest, adding that he has reached out to other organizations such as Behavioral Health Partners and the Freedom Center. “The beauty about the drug testing is with this new system, the more we use it and the more partners we have, the lower our cost.”
“Collaboration, reducing costs, speeding up reports and reliability are very important,” said Common Pleas Judge Richard Wetzel.
Priest expects to install the Indiko Plus system on Sept. 11 and begin using it on Sept. 18. The system uses bar codes for identification, which complies with HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) regulations regarding privacy. The court bought the system through the PIIG program (Probation Improvement and Incentive Grant).
A second area of collaboration involves community service. Lisa Lyons, chief probation officer for the Court of Common Pleas, said the court plans to assign more offenders to the municipal court’s officer-supervised community service work program. “We’d like to use it as one of our sanctions for our [offenders],” she said.