Barry A. Hazle Jr. served a year in prison on a drug charge. After he got out, his parole agent sent him back for being an atheist. Now, the 41-year-old Redding computer technician has won a ruling from a Sacramento federal judge against the state and stands to collect damages for having his constitutional rights violated. Even before U.S. District Judge Garland E. Burrell Jr. decided in his favor last week, California corrections officials had issued a new policy protecting the rights of atheist parolees. “This has been a long and painful process for me,” Hazle said in a statement through his attorney this week. “The judge’s ruling can’t give me back my lost freedom, but it begins to restore my faith in our judicial system.”

Hazle’s fight with the state over religion began Feb. 27, 2007, when he was paroled from the California Rehabilitation Center, Norco, where he did a year for drug possession. As a condition of his release, Hazle was ordered to attend a 90-day, inpatient drug treatment program. He agreed to the program but even before his release told prison officials he wanted to be sent to a “treatment facility that did not contain religious components,” federal court papers state. Instead, he was assigned to the Empire Recovery Center in Redding, a 12-step program pioneered by Alcoholics Anonymous and featuring a strong religious overtone, utilizing references to God and “a higher power.”

When Hazle asked to be moved to a program that was not faith-based, he was told – wrongly, as it turned out – there was none in Northern California. His parole agent, Mitch Crofoot, instructed him that “he should continue to participate in the Empire program or he would be returned to prison,” court papers state. Hazle kept attending but also persisted in objecting to the arrangement, presenting Crofoot with a written appeal on April 3, 2007. Three days later, according to court papers, Empire workers told the parole agent that Hazle had “been disruptive, though in a congenial way.” That same day Crofoot called Hazle out of an Empire treatment class, arrested him on a parole violation for not participating in the very program he was attending, and booked him into the Shasta County jail. Soon thereafter Hazle was returned to prison, where he spent more than three months.

Article continues. It is good that Mr. Hazle has a restored faith in our judicial system.  Articles like this only serve to lessen my faith.  Prohibition has cost the USA more in money and lives than it could have ever saved.  Alcoholics Anonymous is a fine program for those who volunteer for it in the same way that a religious group or a sports team or a community college class or getting out for a walk now and then can be helpful for someone seeking change in their life.  But the State has no business compelling anyone to join AA.  AA does not have consistent evidence that they are any more helpful than other treatments or no treatment at all, and so the State should seek groups that have a better record of positive outcomes.  AA is a religious group, and so the State should not refer people to it.  Mr. Hazle might consider moving to San Francisco, where an appeals court found State-mandated attendance at AA unconstitutional.  Why does the State send people to AA? Because as a volunteer organization, it is free.  So is getting out for a walk now and then, and you don’t have to offer prayers to a serene invisible monster that lives in the sky to get some good out of it.  State-mandated AA is a form of theater that has the appearance of helping people but is actually a fake solution to a fake problem – the fake problem of prohibition.

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In fact, said the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, the constitutional dividing line between church and state in such cases is so clear that a parole officer can be sued for damages for ordering a parolee to go through rehabilitation at Alcoholics Anonymous or an affiliated program for drug addicts.

Rulings from across the nation since 1996 have established that “requiring a parolee to attend religion-based treatment programs violates the First Amendment,” the court said. “While we in no way denigrate the fine work of (Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous), attendance in their programs may not be coerced by the state.”

[Article continues at link. - Trevor Blake]

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