An alliance of Colorado treatment providers contends the state has created a blatant conflict of interest in drunken driving cases by permitting a private company to serve simultaneously as probation officer and alcohol counselor.
The counseling agencies say the dual role could undermine the trust and confidentiality needed for alcohol therapy and coerce probation clients to sign up for treatment programs offered by the same company.
Some also see a public health risk.
“My main concern is coming from the victims’ standpoint,” said Tammy Lovejoy, a Lakewood counseling center owner whose daughter needs physical therapy three times a week after a drunken driver hit her five years ago.
“If we are having ineffective treatment, it will increase our risk of recidivism,” she said. “That, I believe, should be a concern for all of our community.”
The alliance was formed to fight efforts by a leading private probation provider, Rocky Mountain Offender Management Systems, or RMOMS, to offer alcohol counseling at a discount to DUI offenders.
The provider’s manager, Dan Beeck, sees a different treatment problem for drunken drivers in Colorado: Some don’t get effective counseling because they cannot afford the weekly agency fees.
As the economy faltered last year, “we noticed a real difficulty with our offenders being able to afford the counseling they were ordered to attend,” he said.
Beeck said the uproar from treatment providers forced him to suspend plans to offer cheaper counseling. His company currently provides free alcohol counseling to a limited number of indigent probation clients.
“I pay for it out of my own pocket. It was the right thing to do,” he said.
The state Division of Behavioral Health granted Beeck’s company a three-month license to provide that counseling last November and extended the trial period. But it has not acted on the company’s application for a full counseling license.
At a contentious meeting last Wednesday, alcohol counselors accused the state agency of endorsing “a Wal-Mart approach” to the problem of drunken driving in Colorado by putting law enforcement and therapy under one big roof.
In response, division director Janet Wood expressed her own misgivings about the agency’s decision, saying the temporary license had been approved by a staff member without enough discussion about its implications.
“I don’t want to vilify one of my staff, who is very deeply troubled by putting the agency in this situation,” she told the counselors. “We recognize there’s a problem, and we’re working on it.”
Private probation management is a growing business in Colorado, in part because its mostly low-risk clients pay a fee for their own supervision, enabling the judicial system to order probation at no additional cost to the state. The list of drivers ordered to private probation for driving while impaired or under the influence has grown 57 percent in two years, to 10,310 clients in fiscal 2008.
Beeck estimates that his company alone supervises 5,000 to 6,000 DUI offenders.
But its efforts to expand into DUI treatment triggered alarms among counselors when it sought to open new treatment locations, sent job solicitation letters to more than a thousand licensed counselors and advertised a proposed counseling rate of $50 a month — about half the cost at existing agencies.
“They basically began what would have been a price war against 250 Front Range providers,” said Karen Moreau, a Denver-area program director.
Lovejoy said clients who come to her Lakewood counseling agency have complained they were “run through like herds of cattle” at RMOMS probation offices, and a former RMOMS case manager told her Beeck’s company paid bonuses to those who collected the most money from clients.
Beeck agreed that “every case manager can receive a financial bonus at the end of the month based on collecting what is owed — that’s how our business is funded.”
He said his company’s probation services are audited regularly, and he has offered to limit his DUI services initially to clients not supervised by his probation case managers.
To date, he said, the Division of Behavioral Health will not even let him do that.
His company’s goal, he said, is “to provide a lower- cost alternative to the existing marketplace with the intention that more people will successfully finish their treatment.”
“If I can’t get my license” to offer DUI counseling, he said, “I won’t be able to provide $10 or $12 treatment for anybody.”
