Jim Gogek

How many could avoid prison with drug treatment?

For decades, people in California have talked about prison reform. Even while we were locking up record numbers of young Californians with laws such as Three-Strikes-and-You’re-Out, Democrats and Republicans (well, not the troglodytes) alike have been talking about how we need to divert nonviolent offenders to rehabilitation programs instead of simply jailing them. And California did have some innovative programs to do just that. Only, they were pilot programs. They never became institutionalized. And they were never really supported by the all-powerful prison guards’ union, because they didn’t create enough prison jobs.

It’s long been known that most criminal offenders are substance abusers; most of them are untreated addicts, hence the high recidivism rate. They get out of prison with no treatment, go score their drug of choice – whether its alcohol, crack or crystal – then get loaded and commit new crimes. It ain’t rocket science to prevent this. Oodles of research and pilot projects show that providing treatment and aftercare to addicted offenders reduces recidivism and criminal justice costs. The famous CALDATA study from the early 1990s found that every $1 spent on drug and alcohol treatment saved $7 in taxpayer money, mostly because of reduced crime.

Meanwhile, California’s Little Hoover Commission continually over the years urged more drug courts, treatment, rehabilitation, education and training for both youth and adult prison inmates to reduce overcrowding and huge taxpayer costs.

But, we didn’t do it, not in any meaningful way. A meaningful way would have been to divert incarceration dollars to treatment and rehabilitation programs and push most inmates and parolees into treatment and long-term aftercare for their addiction. But the prison guards’ union wouldn’t allow that, and neither would conservative politicians — or most liberal politicians who either didn’t want to be seen as soft on crime or who just didn’t think it was very important. The state’s prison budget has increased fivefold since 1994. But we didn’t see fit to use that money to transform our corrections system so that it would stymie recidivism.

Now, it’s too late. The federal government is forcing the State of California to release 45,000 inmates – the size of a small city – because of overcrowding and inadequate health care in prisons. The State Legislature recently passed bills called prison reform, but they were really just ways to cut a billion dollars from the prison budget with some window dressing to try to fool people into thinking that lawmakers were doing something positive.

The state says that it will be sending these released prisoners to local programs. But they’re being cut by the state revenue raid of

California prison population outta control

local government and cuts to state-funded treatment and rehabilitation, like the deletion of  Proposition 36 funding. So those local programs, such as probation, jails and rehabilitation, actually have less capacity then they did six months ago, yet the state is sending more offenders to local jurisdictions. All these problems will only get worse as California’s budget problems grow next year.

The moral to this story is…well, there is no moral. People give lip service to prison reform, but I’ve never seen it really done, not in California or anywhere else in the United States. We could be diverting huge numbers of offenders from our prisons. But the truth is — we don’t really want to.