Boasting from the start that "I can fake my way through any program. I'll take 'em for what they got," Crystal graduates two years later a changed woman. Shavelson attributes this success to the fact that despite her relapses and occasional truancies, the drug court judge and rehab team "simply [stuck] to her like glue." More an exquisite piece of theater than it is anything else, a drug court walks its charges through a predictable series of rebellions and transgressions, intensifying treatment when they start using again instead of kicking them out, manipulating them into the kind of program they need. The threat of being sent back to criminal court is the drug court's stick, and lavish praise for those who clean up their acts is its carrot. Crystal's stint in Walden is predictably "stormy" and she shrewdly observes that "when things get deeper at Walden than 'Don't do dope,' they don't know how to deal with it. But I talked to the judge and my Drug Court case manager and they're insisting I have a therapist at Walden 'cause I need some real help with this depression or I'll be back on the crack pipe."

The great irony of drug courts, though, is that you have to be a criminal to end up in them. Darlene, who supported herself with petty thefts but never got caught, managed to get the care she needed only because Shavelson went to bat for her, getting her a meeting with a gifted psychiatrist and pleading her case when his clinic tried to have her kicked out for threatening a worker. Mike does eventually wind up in jail for burglarizing his sister-in-law's house for drug money, but stands little chance of getting into drug court because the break-in was residential, not commercial, and prosecutors don't want to seem to be coddling offenders who have been "terrorizing the community." Not only that, but because he has been convicted of a couple of other minor, nonviolent felonies in the past, he faces a three-strikes penalty of 25 years to life -- a grotesque travesty of justice, given how badly he wants to be a responsible husband and father and how well he might do with the right kind of help.

"Hooked," with its tales of lives horribly mangled by everything from childhood abuse to mental illness to bad luck and, of course, addiction, gives the lie to the boot camp mentality that prevails in our public conversation about drug abuse. You need only look at the "before" and then the radiant "after" photos of Darlene and Crystal (beaming as she graduates from drug court) to see the kind of results that playing drill sergeant will never get us. Drug courts -- derided by some as "hug courts" -- don't coddle addicts, but they don't abuse or abandon them either. Shavelson has good things to say about a recent judicial mandate in New York that would send nearly all nonviolent drug-addicted offenders into rehab, but cautions that California's recently passed Proposition 36 doesn't insist on the kind of coordinated monitoring needed to make its similar directive pay off.

If you believe, as I do, that the war on drugs is really just a job creation program for people who'd otherwise be out of work now that the Cold War is over (the spooks and soldiers go to Colombia and the weapons-plant workers go to the prison-industrial complex), then, alas, it's hard to see the kind of revelations found in "Hooked" having much effect on public policy. Despite McCaffrey's own endorsement of the drug court model, you just have to do the math to see that things haven't changed that much. As McCaffrey left the Office of National Drug Control Policy at the end of 2000, the 2001 budget allocated $50 million to drug courts, $420 million to new prisons and $1.3 billion to fight the drug war in Colombia.

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"