Apparently so. Milwaukee, so recently the subject of a scathing report by the Sentencing Project and Human Rights Watch on the racial disparities in its prison system, seems to be making a haphazard but encouraging move towards ameliorating its inner-city woes. Following other urban centers around the country, Milwaukee is in the process of creating a drug treatment court, one that functions by bringing offenders, prosecutors, treatment specialists and judges under the same roof. Together, they formulate an individualized approach to drug crimes that rewards compliance- while holding the ominous specter of hard time in prison over the heads of those who refuse to cooperate. As the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports, the court is in its infant phase – only two offenders are currently being treated – but there is a sense that the scope of the court may expand to target an entire demographic of drug users whose biggest impediment is not violent crime, but themselves. The next step? That depends on whether the city’s police and courts can relinquish some of that tough-on-crime fa?ade that earned it one of the highest drug arrest disparities between blacks and whites in the nation. Granted, part of that disparity is justified by the evidence. But any opportunity to ameliorate said disparity, however small, is something to be seized upon. It will be up to the legal establishment of Milwaukee to expand the scope of the treatment court – a move that seems to shout “progressive,” but whose fine print reads “practical” -in order to cut down on her abundant stock of unnecessary jail inmates. If the court can rehabilitate its first two “patients” and create some semblance of feasibility for the skeptics, the state will go a long way to putting the ugly conclusions of the Sentencing Project report to rest.