As treatment courts have spread across the state to help people with drug and alcohol addictions stay out of jail and put their lives back together, one judge has found success with a fresh approach to accountability court.

Cobb County Superior Court Chief Judge Tain Kell has pioneered a new type of drug court aimed at helping people before they get into enough trouble to qualify for the others. It's called intermediate court, and it's open to those with lesser offenses than the other programs.

“Early on, someone suggested we call this program 'Drug Court Lite,'” Kell said in an emailed note about the intermediate court, “but I rejected that name. This court is anything but light.”

Intermediate Drug Court incorporates the same levels of supervision, testing and counseling as traditional drug court, he said. The phases of the treatment are shorter, however, and the amount of time participants spend in court is less.

Kell's new court, launched a year ago, graduated its first class this week. Four people.

“We are so proud of these graduates,” Kell said. “They have truly made amazing progress in the past year. It is not an exaggeration to say that they are new people from when they entered this program.”

Kell said that Cobb hopes to present a report on the program to the Council of Accountability Court Judges later this year, to see if other courts are interested in the model. Gov. Nathan Deal created the council in 2015 to oversee the accountability courts in Georgia and coordinate their activities.

Kell said that drug courts have been open only to high-risk, high-need individuals—those most in danger of going to jail. When Deal launched the accountability court movement as part of his judicial reform effort in his first term, the goal was to free up jail bed space as well as help people become productive taxpaying citizens. Deal has said that accountability courts helped him avoid having to build two new prisons that state officials thought they were going to need. Instead, he was able to close some.

“Intermediate Drug Court is designed for those persons who have a drug problem but have not yet reached a level of 'high risk' in their behaviors,” Kell said. “For example, most of our participants have maintained a job and some family ties, or they have achieved some higher education. Most importantly, they have managed to stay out of serious trouble with the law, and we intend to keep it that way.”

Kell said he sees the participants once a month. “In between, they report to the program coordinator and case manager. They attend fewer weekly sessions—according to their individual needs—but they have the same amount of weekly drug testing,” he said.

Research supports tailoring the level of monitoring and counseling to the needs of the participant, Kell said.

“Believe it or not, according to the data, you can hamper a participant's likelihood of success by over scheduling them,” Kell said. “There is actually such a thing as 'too much court.'”