A Visit to Black Mountain

Last week, as part of the North Carolina Judicial College’s Correctional Facilities Tour (West), I visited the Black Mountain Substance Abuse Treatment Center for Women. Today’s post shares some things we learned about Black Mountain—North Carolina’s one and only state-run community-based residential substance abuse treatment program for women on probation or parole. As a few of you may remember from this blog post I wrote nearly a decade ago, Black Mountain opened in 2010 as the state’s lone residential substance abuse treatment center for women. Before that, we had DART Cherry for men, but no counterpart program for women. (Posts describing DART Cherry are available here and here.) Where is Black Mountain? Black Mountain is in Buncombe County, east of Asheville. What is Black Mountain, legally? Like DART Cherry, Black Mountain is a residential program. A judge can order it as a special condition of probation under G.S. 15A-1343(b1)(2) or, I suppose, as a “community and intermediate probation condition” under G.S. 15A-1343(a1)(4). As a legal matter, any probationer (community or intermediate, felon, misdemeanant, or impaired driver) is eligible to attend, subject to program eligibility requirements that I’ll get to in a moment. There is no fee to attend the program. Black Mountain is not an option as part of an active sentence. A judge can recommend substance abuse treatment for someone being sent to jail or prison, but it will be provided in the jail or prison, not at Black Mountain. That said, a small number of former inmates attend Black [...]