Waiting List for Addiction Treatment in Federal Prisons Is 51,000 Inmates Long

Addicted prisoners are waiting years for therapy; The Feds have more money than states….if this is the situation in Fed Pens,  think about state prisons…..

The Fix / By Seth Ferranti

Federal prisons are full of drug offenders—more than 90,000 of them, according to a Government Accountability Office (GAO)  report released this week. Yet only about a third of those prisoners— most of them low-level drug dealers, users and addicts—are receiving treatment to combat their addictions. “Its really tragic,” one longtime federal prisoner tells  The Fix . “The feds lock up all these crackheads and junkies and then don’t even give them any programs to get them off drugs. Worse still, the one drug program they do have,  RDAP, has all types of restrictions on who can get in, for what crime, etc. If you don’t fit the specific criteria, you can’t get in.”

The waiting list for the Bureau of Prisons’ Residential Drug Abuse Program, which allows successful participants to get up to a year off their sentences, is long— 51,000 inmates long, according to the GAO report. “I have been in prison 15 years, waiting to get into the drug program,” another prisoner tells us. “What they do is they run you right to the door. Like I wasn’t even eligible to sign up until I was 36 months short [of release]. Now I have been on the RDAP unit for seven months and I’m  still not in the program. They wait until you are 28 months short or less till they put you in. Then it takes nine months or so for the program and you get 12 months off and six months’ halfway house—that’s how it’s supposed to work. But if I don’t get in by next month the clock is ticking on my 12 months off.”

Bureau of Prisons policies, and the way they’re carried out, mean that drug addicts serving long sentences don’t get treatment until right before they go home—despite the  wide availability  of drugs inside. “I’ve been doing drugs for 15 years in prison,” the second prisoner says. “And now I have to get clean so I can complete the program and go home. It’s not easy: I’m a drug addict.” Prisoners who relapse or violate any prison rule or regulation are  kicked out  of RDAP. But usually these prisoners are the ones that need the program the most. Instead of helping long-term prisoners get treatment early, the BOP supports a system that enables drug use and only entices prisoners to quit much later. “Of course I want the year off,” says the addicted prisoner. “Of course I want to go home. But I wish I didn’t have to wait so long to get the treatment I need, so that I can go out and live a drug- and crime-free life and not come back to prison.”

 

Seth Ferranti is serving 25 years for drug trafficking. This is his first column for The Fix. To learn more about prisoners who are working hard at a commutation, check out straight-a-guide.com. for more of Ferranti’s writings, go to gorillaconvict.com.

 

Related articles

• Prisoners face long wait for drug-rehab services (usatoday.com)
• Report: BOP Rarely Seeks ‘Compassionate’ Release (prisonmovement.wordpress.com)

The Shocking Ways the Corporate Prison Industry Games the System

The private prison system has rebounded, growing dramatically, and making big bucks with huge help from the Feds, as large numbers of immigrants are incarcerated.

 

By Rania Khalek

 

The United States, with just 5 percent of the world’s population, currently holds 25 percent of the world’s prisoners, and for the last 30 years America’s business entrepreneurs have found a lucrative way to cash in on the incarceration surplus: private for-profit prisons.

While the implications of an industry that locks human beings in cages for profit is an old story, there is an important part of the history of private prisons that often goes untold.

Just a decade ago, private prisons were a dying industry awash in corruption and mired in lawsuits, particularly Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the nation’s largest private prison operator.  Today, these companies are booming once again, yet the lawsuits and scandals continue to pile up.  Meanwhile, more and more evidence shows that compared to publicly run prisons, private jails are filthier, more violent, less accountable, and contrary to what privatization advocates peddle as truth, do not save money.  In fact, more recent findings suggest that private prisons could be more costly.

So why are they still in business?

In a recently published report, “Banking on Bondage: Mass Incarceration and Private Prisons,” the American Civil Liberties Union examines the history of prison privatization and finds that private prison companies owe their continued and prosperous existence to skyrocketing immigration detention post September 11 as well as the firm hold they have gained over elected and appointed officials.

 

t.” That quickly changed as the War on Drugs ‘tough on crime’ mentality swept the nation with institution of draconian sentencing and release laws for nonviolent offenders, causing an explosion in US incarceration rate.  State and federal governments increasingly struggled with overcrowded prisons and the rising costs of housing the rapidly growing pool of inmates.

Coupled with the emergence of privatization madness under Ronald Reagan (a pattern that has continued under both Democrat and Republican administrations), skyrocketing imprisonment presented the perfect opportunity for the private sector to get in on the action, with promises of cost savings and more efficient operations than government-run facilities.  In 1984, the Corrections Corporation of America was awarded a contract to operate a public jail in Hamilton County, Tennessee, and the nation’s first-ever private prison was born.

 

According to the ACLU report, From 1970 to 2005, the number of people locked up in the US shot up by 700 percent. Meanwhile, between 1990 and 2009 the number of prisoners behind private prison bars exploded from 7,000 to 129,000 inmates, a growth rate of 1600 percent.  But the private prison boom of the ‘90s did not last.

Immigration Detention Saves the Day

In 1999, independent auditors were skeptical about whether CCA could stay afloat because beds were empty and the company experienced a $72 million net loss in revenue. By 2000, an article in BusinessWeek declared “the industry is in a rut, and its prospects have been severely trimmed. Overbuilding and ill-fated financial schemes have hammered stock prices. States, once eager to outsource their inmates, are backing out of private prison contracts. News of escapes and violence at private prisons adds to a climate of distrust.”  The article concludes that “the industry’s heyday may already be history.”

A 2001 article in the American Prospect, Bailing Out Private Jails, offers a snapshot of the industry’s bleak future at the turn of the century:

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