In a community that prided itself on being tough on crime, the opioid crisis forced a harder question: what if punishment alone was never going to be enough?

In 2018 and 2019, Danville and Pittsylvania County ranked in the top 10 jurisdictions in all of Virginia for overdose deaths.

It was a region that had always prided itself on being tough on crime — and the opioid crisis was winning anyway.

Judge Stacey Moreau watched it from the bench. The cases came through. The sentences went out. And then the paperwork arrived that no judge expects to receive.

Not a sentencing document. Not a probation report. An obituary.

"I had signed more people off of probation because I had gotten their obituary from dying from an opioid than I had in the last 10 years combined. It was crisis time, for sure."

Something had to change. Not a tweak to the system — a departure from it entirely.

A Complete Departure

Bringing a recovery court to Danville and Pittsylvania County was not a small shift in policy. It was, as Candice Valdez, Coordinator with the Danville-Pittsylvania Recovery Court, described it, “a complete departure from the original train of thought.”

There was a realization, Lee Smallwood, Deputy Public Defender, said “that a different type of approach was needed — an approach that was not simply based on punishment.”

Moreau, the inaugural judge to preside over the new court put it more plainly: “I wanted something to help people instead of just locking them up.”

The Danville-Pittsylvania County Recovery Court, made possible through Virginia Opioid Abatement Authority awards to the City of Danville and Pittsylvania County, was designed to do exactly what the traditional system could not: treat the person, not just the charge.

Participants get access to doctors, therapists, programs, peer support — and help navigating the ordinary demands of daily life that addiction had made impossible.

Everyone on the Same Side

Walk into a traditional courtroom and the architecture tells you everything: prosecution on one side, defense on the other, a judge elevated above both. The adversarial structure is the point. There is a side that wins and a side that loses.

Recovery court dismantles that structure entirely.

“A lot of times we are counter to the goal of defense counsel, and it’s different in treatment court because we’re all working together for the same goal,” said City of Danville Senior Assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney Bo Palmore.

“Things are very different from a normal courtroom,” Smallwood said. “There is a collaborative approach between myself and the prosecutors as well as the rest of the team.”

Each week, the judge who presides over the recovery court wears a different hat. The same robe. A different mission.

“We celebrate people staying clean,” said Judge James Reynolds.

And they celebrate it with people.

“You should feel really proud of yourself,” Reynolds said from the bench to a program participant. “You’ve done really well.”

This is the justice system having compassion and understand recovery, and people benefitting from it as a result, said Melanie Tosh, Director of Behavioral Health Services with Danville-Pittsylvania Community Services.

Treating the Whole Person

There is a misconception about what recovery courts do. Some assume the program is simply about getting people to stop using substances — that sobriety is the finish line, and once crossed, the work is done.

But it’s so much more.

“We’re looking at their basic needs — food, shelter, housing, their mental health needs, things like that — because you have to treat the whole person before they’ll even start to think, ‘I don’t need these substances anymore,’” said Shelly Morton, Probation Office with the Virginia Department of Corrections.

Addiction rarely exists in isolation. It lives alongside trauma, mental illness, poverty, and the kind of accumulated loss that makes the future feel abstract. Recovery court builds a scaffold around a person while they do the work of rebuilding — doctors, therapists, peer support specialists, and a team of people whose entire job is to root for them.

“The treatment court has given these individuals an opportunity to get their lives back together,” said Rhonda Jones, Director of Outpatient and Support Services with Danville-Pittsylvania Community Services. “It’s given them hope. It’s given them a support system to show, hey — we care about you. We are rooting for you. We want you to be better. We want to give you your life back.”

‘I Don’t Want to Go Back There’

For the people who have sat inside a traditional courtroom — staring at the door that leads back to a cell — walking into recovery court carries its own particular weight.

“You can see that it can be a good experience because of things you’re doing, so you don’t have to be scared,” said Pamela Dowell, who participated in the program. “You can go in there and sit down and breathe. It took me a good minute to do that, because I’ve been in there with a judge in the courtroom and a bailiff, and you’re looking at that door like, I don’t want to go back down there.”

It was a struggle at first, she said, because “I wasn’t used to nobody helping me and listening.” She was used to doing it her own way.

“Running into drugs and things I didn’t need is what put me there,” she said. “And that’s what was keeping me there. I didn’t want to be there anymore. That’s why I asked for drug court.”

Proof That It Works

When the recovery court was new, the skeptics were vocal. This community, this population, this approach — it isn’t going to work.

“I’ve heard people in the community tell me that what you’re doing isn’t going to work for this person,” Morton said. “I’ve got proof that it does.”

The proof is in the people who have walked through the program and not walked back out through that other door. People who reunited with their families. Who held down jobs. Who built lives that looked nothing like the ones that brought them to court in the first place.

“There was an increasing understanding of the mechanism of addiction, and it creates a sense of hopefulness,” Smallwood said.

“It helps break the stigma and it helps provide another avenue for treatment — that’s not just incarceration,” Valdez said. “It’s a way that people can become better, stronger, clean, sober members of society, to become productive.”

Moreau and Reynolds have watched all of it. They have signed the paperwork on the hard days and the good ones. They know what the program has cost and what it has returned.

“Treatment court … has put individuals on the path of sobriety,” Moreau said. “They’ve been able to reunite with their families, to be able to hold jobs down. It provides hope to individuals. It’s a blessing to our community and to the people that have been in the program. Treatment courts work.”

The Danville-Pittsylvania Recovery Court was made possible through Virginia Opioid Abatement Authority awards to the City of Danville and Pittsylvania County.