Persons with gambling disorders shouldn’t be subjected to the regular criminal court system says professionals who treat such disorders.
They should have their own courts, say psychologists in New Zealand who regularly deal with compulsive gamblers as part of their daily jobs. Such courts should be funded from taxes taken from casinos, racetracks, and the lottery.
They would like courthouses that are being built in Auckland and Waitakere for drug courts to have room set aside for gambling courts.
There are already gambling courts in New York City.
The Gambling and Addictions Research Centre at the Institute of AUT University recently published a study showing that a third of prisoners studied said they had committed gambling related crimes.
Psychologist Sean Sullivan told Radio New Zealand, “If you’ve committed a gambling-related crime, you’ll often be viewed as self-indulgent or taking someone else’s money. In other words, you had choice over your behavior.”
Sullivan said that gamblers typically don’t want to bring up their addiction to the courts because they fear the courts will conclude that they cannot be reformed. He added, “They stop gambling when they go to jail, generally, and come out thinking they’re cured and within a very short time they’re back at it full tilt.”
His suggestion for taking levies from gaming operators to fund such a court doesn’t appeal the New Zealand Ministry of Health, which said it doesn’t have any plans to do that, but was open to “innovative approaches.”
New York has such a court. According to law professor Stacey Tovino, based in Las Vegas, “How it works is that the individual must actually plead guilty to their crime. So they plead guilty but then, instead of being sentenced, they are diverted to treatment.”
She told Radio New Zealand, “If you can lower costs by getting people out of jail and into treatment, and if you can get rid of or treat and put the individual in recovery or remission from the underlying mental problem, you are getting both clinical and financial and economic benefits there.”
