All Mod Cons
Libby wants to take some of the massive amount of money the US spends on prisons and convert a portion of them to drug treatment facilities. This seems reasonable, if we first disentangle drug use from addiction conceptually. The US legal system construes any illegal-drug user as an “addict,” and probably sends people to “treatment” who don’t even need it.
The other suggestion I’ve seen is that, for a fraction of our aggregate prison budget, we could have real probation and parole systems, where officers are well-trained and have small enough case loads that they can really keep tabs on their clients. I haven’t investigated the numbers and the research on just what a well-funded probation system could achieve, though.
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Comment by Blar —
January 27, 2008 @ 7:24 pm
Mark Kleiman & Angela Hawken had an article about a serious probation program in Hawaii, focused on hard drug users.
Comment by Thoreau —
January 27, 2008 @ 8:10 pm
Make them go to rehab?
I say no, no, no.
Comment by Glaivester —
January 27, 2008 @ 10:22 pm
Of course, the assumption here is that the real goal here is curtail drug use. Back in 2006, ziel made a good point about the real reason why people support drug laws:
What Americans really want out of drug laws is the continued mass imprisonment of criminally-oriented blacks and Hispanics. Drugs give the criminal justice system an easy way to throw hundreds of thousands of young minority men into jail for extended periods of time. This makes people feel safe – but it’s a rather crude way to enforce justice, since drug involvement is essentially being used as a proxy for real crimes.
I think that there is a lot of truth to this, and any attempt to change our drug laws will require us to confront this attitude.
Comment by Thoreau —
January 27, 2008 @ 11:43 pm
I would agree that drug laws are a convenient way to go after members of certain ethnic and/or social and/or income groups. Proving that somebody stole something or beat someone up or whatever is hard. Coming up with a pretext to search a car and find a joint is easy.
Comment by Libby —
January 28, 2008 @ 9:35 am
I’m not advocating forced rehab such as the charade of court ordered treatments for teenagers who go into programs for their “problem” to avoid jail time for small amounts of marijuana, but the reality is there are a lot of real addicts who want help and can’t get a bed. I don’t have the figures off the top of my head but the waiting lists are enormous and the wait time is long. I’m aware it’s not a perfect solution.
Agree we have to redefine the concept of what constitutes responsible use vs. abuse.
Comment by Jim Henley —
January 28, 2008 @ 9:46 am
Hey Lib: Thanks. Check out Blair’s link in Comment 1 on Hawaii’s Project H.O.P.E. By moving people who can stay clean on their own to a testing regime, it appears to free up rehab beds for genuine addicts.