Wentworth County District Attorney Vivian Ashcroft announced Monday that her office will more than double the capacity of its diversion program for low-level drug cases, expanding a treatment-first approach she says has cut re-arrests dramatically among participants.
Wentworth County District Attorney Vivian Ashcroft announced Monday that her office’s diversion program for low-level drug cases will grow from 120 slots a year to 300, with participants offered dismissal of charges upon completing treatment and case-management requirements. The expansion is funded by a mix of county dollars and a state grant totaling $1.1 million over two years.
Under the program, people charged with simple possession and certain other nonviolent drug offenses can enroll in outpatient treatment coordinated through Wayfinder Recovery Services and the Wentworth County Department of Health. Those who complete the program — 62 percent of participants so far, according to the DA’s office — have their charges dismissed.
Ashcroft cited internal figures showing 18 percent of program graduates were re-arrested within two years, compared with 41 percent of similar defendants prosecuted conventionally. “We tried the courtroom-only approach for two decades,” she said at a news conference at the county courthouse. “The numbers told us to try something else, and the numbers now tell us it’s working.”
Treatment providers welcome the growth, with a caveat
Donna Wysocki, executive director of Wayfinder Recovery Services, said the nonprofit has hired three additional counselors to absorb the new referrals but warned that outpatient capacity across the county remains tight. “We can take these clients,” Wysocki said. “What we can’t do is conjure sober-living beds that don’t exist. Diversion works best when the housing piece is there too.”
Dr. Kwame Asare, director of the Wentworth County Department of Health, said the expansion fits a broader county strategy that has helped push overdose deaths down for three consecutive years. “Every person we route into treatment instead of a cell is a person we can actually keep track of, keep alive and keep moving forward,” Asare said.
Skeptics want tighter guardrails
The expansion drew criticism from some quarters. Bridget Farrow of the Wentworth County Crime Victims Coalition said her group does not object to diverting possession cases but worries about the inclusion of some low-level dealing charges tied to addiction. “There’s a line between someone who is sick and someone who is profiting,” Farrow said. “We want to see how carefully that line gets drawn.”
Ashcroft responded that eligibility screening excludes anyone with a violent record or evidence of significant trafficking, and that prosecutors retain discretion to pull a defendant out of the program for new offenses. Sales cases are eligible, she said, only where the quantity involved is consistent with supporting a personal addiction.
Diversion is not a get-out-of-jail-free card. It is the hardest eighteen months most of these defendants will ever do, and the ones who finish come out the other side with a life instead of a record.
Vivian Ashcroft, Wentworth County district attorney
The move also carries practical weight for a county criminal-justice system under visible strain. Commissioners recently approved a package of pretrial reforms aimed at reducing the jail’s record population, and Ashcroft acknowledged the diversion expansion serves that goal as well. Roughly one in nine bookings at the county jail last year involved a charge that would now be diversion-eligible, according to her office’s analysis.
City Council Member Gary Petrowski, who represents Cedar Hollow and has long pushed for treatment funding, attended Monday’s announcement and called it overdue. “Families in my district have been saying for years that a jail cell never cured anybody,” Petrowski said. “It’s good to see the numbers finally catch up to what they already knew.”
For participants, the program is demanding by design. Enrollees complete an intake assessment within two weeks, attend outpatient sessions two to four times weekly, submit to regular testing and meet monthly with a case manager who tracks employment, housing and family obligations. Most participants take twelve to eighteen months to finish. A missed session triggers a review rather than automatic expulsion, an approach Wysocki said reflects how recovery actually works. “Relapse is part of the clinical picture,” she said. “The question is whether someone re-engages, not whether they stumble.”
Graduates of the pilot version describe the stakes plainly. One Cedar Hollow man who completed the program two years ago, and who asked that his name not be published because his record has since been sealed, said the dismissal let him pass a commercial driver’s license background check. “That charge would have followed me to every application for the rest of my life,” he said. “Instead I’ve got a route, a paycheck and two years clean.”
The expansion positions Wentworth County among a growing number of mid-sized metro areas treating prosecution capacity as a public-health lever, though Ashcroft resisted framing it in national terms. “I’m not trying to make a statement,” she said. “I’m trying to make the numbers in this county better than they were last year.”
Enrollment under the expanded program begins within the month. Ashcroft said her office will publish completion and re-arrest data annually, a transparency commitment she described as a condition of the state grant. “If the results stop holding up, we’ll say so publicly,” she said. “That’s the deal.”