Mandatory terms serve few, Oro Valley parents of jailed woman say

Their daughter’s first prison term devastated Dick and Roxana Johnson, but the Oro Valley couple also understood the reasons.

That’s not how it feels this time around.

Colleen Johnson’s recent return to Arizona’s Perryville Prison in Goodyear for nearly five years undermines the progress she was making and, they say, illustrates how poorly the state’s mandatory-sentencing laws serve its citizens.

Dick Johnson, a former Oro Valley Town Councilman who filled in as the town’s mayor in 1998, said their daughter had recently made significant improvement in managing her mental-health and substance-abuse challenges.

Her legal case started in 2008, when she was arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol twice within a couple of weeks. She served a two-year term for those DUIs and was still under state supervision when she was rearrested in June 2013.

Their opinion of the state’s legal processes has steadily deteriorated since that summer, and led them to become advocates for change.

LOOKING FORWARD, LOOKING BACK

Looking back, Dick Johnson says, there are things they wish they had handled differently. He wonders if imposing stricter rules when their daughter was a teen or seeking professional help sooner might have helped them avoid where they are now.

Colleen, the older of their two daughters, attended Salpointe Catholic High School and was a strong student until her junior year, when her grades dropped and, her father says, she “started partying.” Colleen declined interview requests for this story.

While there had been indications during her early adolescence that she was struggling, her father said her more significant mental-health challenges — depression, anxiety and things that remain unclear to them, things Colleen didn’t share — started later.

After attending both Northern Arizona University and the University of Arizona, but not completing a program of study, she was slow to get her life going. At the same time, she was well-liked, funny and clearly very intelligent, her father said.

“She’s the type that, when she gets on an elevator, by the time she gets off, she’s met everybody,” he said.

At the time of her arrest for drunken driving in 2008, she was in her early 40s.

“As parents of Colleen Johnson, we know that what Colleen has done is very serious and deserves punishment,” Dick Johnson wrote in 2009 to former Pima County Superior Court Judge John Leonardo.

“We don’t know the options you have at your disposal to rehabilitate, punish, monitor, etc., but whatever you decide, we know that it will be what you have determined to be the best for Colleen.”

During those two years in Perryville, Johnson said his daughter was a model prisoner who helped other women earn their GEDs. When she was first released, in August 2011, she worked at Baggin’s. But finding her way again, as a convicted felon, was challenging.

“She can’t vote, she can’t do anything,” her father said. “She can’t even get an apartment.”

For a while she stayed home with her parents. She eventually got a job as an assistant manager at an Oro Valley restaurant and that worked for a while. Then things started to unravel again.

When she was arrested in June 2013, she was driving very slowly near her house. She blew a 0.05 on an alcohol breath test. That’s below the legal limit of 0.08, but people can be charged with DUI for any blood-alcohol level if they are found to be “impaired to the slightest degree.”

She was taking several medications prescribed by her psychiatrist, which her parents believe slowed her down considerably, both physically and mentally, and are the reason she was driving under the speed limit that day.

Colleen was held in Pima County jail over the summer and then, in September 2013, the charges were dismissed without prejudice, which means they could later be refiled.

“We never knew or really understood why they were dismissed,” Dick Johnson said. “Our attorney at that point said it was probably due to delays with the lab.”

As soon as she left the jail, her parents pushed her to go to Cottonwood Tucson for rehabilitation.

“We got to the point where we realized this was the only way we could save our daughter,” he said. The family participated, too, he said, and things improved considerably after Cottonwood.

“Mental health and substance abuse, it’s all interrelated and these are the problems we needed to solve,” he said. “These are the real issues.”

REHABILITATION VS. INCARCERATION

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About 15 months passed, during which Colleen started working again — this time at Impact Southern Arizona, a nonprofit service organization where she’d volunteered after her first prison term. She remained sober, her father said, and followed the terms of her probation “to a ‘T.’ ”

Then, in January 2015, the Pima County Attorney’s Office brought back the charges from her June 2013 arrest.

Her parents were shocked.

“We thought, ‘Holy cow. What’s going on?’ ” Dick Johnson said. “She had been really thriving, and was helping people.”

They tried to find a way to help their daughter, anything instead of prison. The case dragged on for another year, time they remained hopeful there’d be another way. In the end, she entered a guilty plea so her sentence could be scaled down to 4½ years. If the case had gone to trial, she risked a possible six to 15 years in prison, the standard in Arizona for a third DUI conviction in 84 months.

Johnson’s letter to Pima County Superior Court Judge Teresa Godoy in January 2016 reflects his frustration:

“From my experience with Colleen, I am committed to having the Legislature change the archaic laws governing non-violent offenses, especially those of drug and alcohol. Rehabilitation rather than incarceration has proven much more effective and less costly,” he wrote.

“But to take the facts and situation out of the judge’s hands by mandatory sentencing is not right nor fiscally prudent. To me and many others this mandatory sentence is strictly punitive, costly and needlessly harmful to both society and Colleen.”

The average cost per day for an Arizona inmate is $64.93, DOC spokesman Andrew Wilder said. Following that average, Colleen’s current incarceration will cost taxpayers nearly $107,000 — money Johnson wishes the state would instead use to help rehabilitate inmates with mental-health or addiction problems.

“It’s so black and white. There’s no gray,” he said. “For the life of me, I can’t understand this approach, that every situation is the same.”

SUBSTANCE ABUSE

AND MENTAL HEALTH

At the end of February, 11,143 of the 42,626 inmates in Arizona’s prison system were receiving regular mental-health services, state corrections records show.

But many, like the Johnsons and Rae Hopf, board president of an Arizona nonprofit called David’s Hope, believe prison is not where people with mental-health or addiction problems, which are often co-occurring, are best-served.

David’s Hope was started in 2009 on behalf of CEO Mary Lou Brncik’s son, who has mental-health problems and has cycled in and out of lockup.

Other states are using alternatives that Arizona has been slow to adopt, Hopf said. Community supervision, ignition interlock devices and expanded use of mental-health courts could provide the supervision needed.

“Because of our sentencing laws, we have very strict guidelines and so people end up serving long periods of time for what might seem, to you and I, like minimal infractions,” said Hopf.

“That’s one of the big problems we see in this state. The sentencing guidelines that we have have taken all the control away from the judges and have left it in the hands of the legislators.”

But Jason Frazier, state director of Arizona’s Mothers Against Drunk Driving, said when it comes to driving under the influence, they often see “repeat after repeat after repeat.”

“Therefore,” he said, “we support the law in Arizona and we support mandatory sentencing.”

On average, about 3,000 peopled are injured and 230 to 280 are killed each year in Arizona due to someone driving under the influence of drugs or alcohol, he said.

“People do say it’s a non-violent offense and it might be, but it can also be one of the most violent offenses there are,” he said.

Joe St. Louis, a Tucson defense attorney who specializes in DUI cases, said Arizona has some of the most punitive DUI laws in the country. He said alternatives to locking people up need to be used more often.

“In this case, she was being a productive member of society, working, paying taxes and helping the economy overall and now she’s become a drain on the economy,” said St. Louis, who was not Colleen Johnson’s attorney. “When she gets out in five years, what are her prospects of getting a job at that point?”

St. Louis said he often sees cases where people are struggling with mental-health problems and self-medicate with alcohol. Predetermined sentences limit judges’ ability to consider mitigating factors like an individual’s background, community support, likelihood to reoffend and available alternatives.

“You have to get at the core reasons why they are doing that, and locking them up doesn’t change who they are,” he said. “Only treatment can help change that.”