New York Gambling Treatment Court Stresses Help

AMHERST, N.Y. - The docket in front of Justice Mark G. Farrell one recent Tuesday afternoon looked like a routine roster of small-time crime: petty larceny, attempted burglary, check forgery. But the offenders shared a single motivation: money to gamble.

Skip to next paragraph Enlarge This Image James Estrin/The New York Times

Justice Mark G. Farrell presides at gambling treatment court in Amherst, N.Y. The judge is known for his stern lectures to defendants.

Such is the criminal parade in the country's first and only gambling treatment court. Following the model of about 2,000 "therapy courts" devoted to drugs and spousal abuse that have opened nationwide in the last two decades, the setup here allows defendants to avoid jail time if they follow a court-supervised program that includes counseling sessions, credit checks and twice-monthly meetings with Justice Farrell.

"I realize this is demanding," the judge said the other day as he ordered Andrew Hallett, 19, who forged his father's checks to feed a bingo and lottery addiction, to attend Gamblers Anonymous meetings twice a week. "If you continue to apply yourself to the program, and you continue to go to the self-helps, we'll get you through it."

Mirroring the rise in gambling nationally and the opening of two new casinos near this suburb of Buffalo, the court's caseload has grown steadily since it opened in 2001, to several dozen cases a year from a handful. And as gambling has become more popular, with the growth of online poker and with New York State lottery revenues nearly doubling to .8 billion over the past six years, Justice Farrell's docket includes middle-aged parents with college degrees and steady jobs as well as young drug users with criminal records.

"Gambling has become almost a genre in our society," said Justice Farrell, who lectures defendants with a stern voice and a no-nonsense tone. A majority of the gamblers he sees can hold their own, he said, "but it's the 5 percent that have problems, and we're seeing an expression of it in gambling court."

The gambling court is too small and too young to show statistically significant results, but its staff members say that more than half the 100-plus defendants so far have completed the treatment program, and only one has been arrested again - on an offense not connected to gambling. But drug courts have shown some impressive results: a 2003 study in Washington State found that participants were 13 percent less likely to become repeat offenders than defendants who went through the regular criminal system, saving ,759 per participant in potential administrative costs and ,020 in costs to victims.

The idea of expanding therapeutic courts to problem gamblers seems to be gaining momentum. Judges and lawyers in Buffalo have recently started steering gambling-related cases toward Amherst, and Justice Farrell has been in demand on the speaking circuit, talking about the program to prosecutors, counselors and other officials in 15 states since 2002.

Don E. Dutton, commissioner of the New Mexico Gaming Control Board, said a statewide task force there plans to recommend the start of such a diversion program by year's end.

Jeffrey J. Marotta, who manages the Oregon Problem Gambling Services in that state's Department of Human Services, said his agency expects to start a pilot program soon.

And in Louisiana, the state attorney general in 2004 set up a diversion program in which gamblers charged with nonviolent crimes can avoid trial if they get treatment.

Keith S. Whyte, executive director of the National Council on Problem Gambling, said California and Illinois have expressed interest in starting gambling courts. Also, Arizona trains its probation officers to watch for problem gamblers.

Justice Farrell, a 59-year-old lawyer, has spent about 35 hours a week since 1994 running Amherst Town Court. With 43,000 cases a year, it is one of the larger of New York's approximately 1,250 town and village courts, which handle two million criminal, domestic-violence, landlord-tenant, traffic and other cases each year. Justice Farrell started a diversion program from drug crimes in 1996, and for domestic violence in 1999.

Justice Farrell, who said he will visit local casinos a few times a year, "lose 0 and figure out what kind of idiot I was," noticed the spike in gambling-related crime by looking for warning signs similar to those he saw with drug addiction and domestic violence.

In a two-and-a-half-week span a few years ago, he said, he saw a dozen cases of car theft, larceny and other crimes committed by otherwise unlikely suspects, and called in experts who determined that gambling was the common theme. Soon, the gambling court was born.

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