Choosing Substance Abuse Treatment Over Prison Could Save Billions: Study

We know that treatment not only saves money, but does in fact save LIVES.  The Prison for Profit mentality MUST change.  The question is no longer how, but when.  Just so you all know, I do NOT support Partnership at Drugfree because of their stance on Cannabis. However, the following is a good article.

 

Sending substance-abusing state prisoners to community-based treatment programs instead of prisons could reduce crime and save billions of dollars, a new study concludes. The savings would result from immediate reductions in the cost of incarceration, and by subsequent reductions in the number of crimes committed by successfully treated offenders, which leads to fewer re-arrests and re-incarcerations, according to the researchers.

Almost half of all state prisoners abuse drugs or are drug-dependent, but only 10 percent received medically based drug treatment while they are incarcerated, according to Newswise. Inmates who are untreated or not adequately treated are more likely to start using drugs when they are released from prison, and commit crimes at a higher rate than those who do not abuse drugs, the article notes.

The researchers built a simulation model of 1.14 million state prisoners, representing the 2004 U.S. state prison population. The model estimated the benefits of substance abuse treatment over individuals’ lifetimes, and calculated the crime and criminal justice costs related to policing, trial and sentencing, and incarceration.

The model tracked individuals’ substance abuse, criminal activity, employment and health care use until death or until they reached age 60, whichever came first. They estimated the costs of sending 10 percent or 40 percent of drug-abusing inmates to community-based substance abuse treatment instead of prison.

In the journal Crime & Delinquency, the researchers found that if just 10 percent of eligible offenders were treated in community-based programs instead of going to prison, the criminal justice system would save $4.8 billion, compared with current practices. If 40 percent of eligible offenders received treatment, the savings would total $12.9 billion.

Via @ Join Together

 

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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.

 

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Majority of third-strike inmates are addicts, records show

Marisa Lagos and Ryan Gabrielson

Michael Macor/San Francisco Chronicle: Inmate counselor Vincent Russo talks about healthy relationships at an Addiction Recovery Counseling meeting at San Quentin State Prison in August.

 

Convicts imprisoned under California’s three strikes law are no more inclined to high-risk “criminal thinking” than other inmates, but are far more likely to be addicted to drugs and alcohol, according to data from the state prisons department.

The psychological, substance abuse and education profiles of thousands of inmates – obtained and analyzed by California Watch and the San Francisco Chronicle – reveal that the state imposes especially lengthy sentences on felons with substance abuse problems who have not necessarily committed violent offenses.

But according to their profiles, these inmates would pose no more a threat to public safety than a non-three-strikes inmate.

The never-before-released data could play an important role for critics and supporters of California’s three strike’s law, amid a dramatic year for criminal justice reform. Thousands of inmates are being transferred to county jails under a realignment plan championed by Gov. Jerry Brown, and voters are being asked to alter the state’s three strikes initiative with a ballot measure in November.

The act of judging a person’s criminal proclivity is steeped in a long and controversial history of guesswork and junk science. But modern social scientists and criminologists say California’s prisoner surveys ranking “criminal thinking” – which have been verified through rigorous studies of recidivism rates – are reliable tools to gauge risk factors and psychological makeups.

The data shows that about one-third of all prisoners – including second- and third-strikers – need cognitive therapy to deal with their criminal tendencies, the impulse that drives them to break the law. But the need for substance abuse rehabilitation is overwhelming among inmates serving two- or three-strike sentences.

Some prison reformers say the profiles show a vast need for additional money and focus on drug treatment programs. But for supporters of the state’s three strikes law, a person’s motivation for committing a crime is far less important that taking habitual criminals off the street for a long time.

Continue Reading @ California Watch

 

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In Drug Courts, Judges Practice Their Own Version of Justice – And “Treatment”

Image via Wikipedia

By Margaret Dooley-Sammuli, AlterNet

Drug courts must be standardized, they must be held accountable and they must not be our primary policy approach to drug use and addiction.

In Glynn County Georgia, reports the popular radio show This American Life this week, Lindsey Dills is the victim of horrifying injustice in the name of drug treatment. For forging two checks on her parents’ checking account when she was 17, one for $40 and one for $60, Ms. Dills ended up in that county’s drug court for five and a half years, including a total of 14 months behind bars – and then, when she was finally kicked out of drug court, she faced another five-year sentence for the original offense, including six months in state prison. In other Georgia counties and in other states, the penalty for this first-time, low-level offense would have been a term of probation and/or drug treatment.

Ms. Dills’ harrowing journey includes a lengthy stay in solitary confinement, being denied access to prescribed anti-depression medication and a suicide attempt. When she entered Glynn County drug court, Ms. Dills had no idea that she was entering a Kafkaesque world in which she had virtually no rights, was subject to the whims of a single dangerous judge and would end up losing years of her life in a dark, unexamined corner of the American criminal justice system.

Superior Court Judge Amanda Williams, who runs the Glynn County drug court, thought she was running her drug court according to national standards. The National Association of Drug Court Professionals (NADCP) says she’s got it all wrong. Judge Williams’ drug court may be unique. But, according to a new report by the Drug Policy Alliance, drug courts across the country exhibit similar (though , one hopes, less extreme) problems.

How is it that Judge Williams is free to steal a decade of Ms. Dills’ life, wreak similar havoc in the lives of so many others and remain on the bench? The fact is that, in drug courts across the country, the judge is king – and doctor.

The NADCP works to educate judges and other court personnel about addiction, to urge drug courts to focus on people with a history of law-breaking that is linked to a drug problem (rather than people facing a first-time drug charge), and to emphasize that incarceration does not “treat” addiction. Like other industry groups, it also serves to promote drug courts through public relations campaigns and to secure increases in federal funding for the programs. The NADCP has no authority over the nation’s more than 2,000 drug courts and, as a spokesperson tells This American Life, the group is aware of at least 150 drug courts that do not operate according to the best practices it promotes.

The Drug Policy Alliance is concerned that the number of drug courts whose practices may actually increase the criminal justice involvement of people struggling with drugs – as well as of people who do not have a drug problem but are convicted of a drug law violation – may be far greater.

Continue Reading….