Drug Treatment Of Nonviolent Drug Offenders Essay

The United States has the world's highest incarceration rate. With five percent of the world's population, our country houses nearly twenty-five percent of the world's reported prisoners. Currently there are approximately two million people in American prisons or jails. Since 1984 the prison population for drug offenders has risen from ten percent to now over thirty percent of the total prison population. Federal prisons were estimated to hold 179,204 sentenced inmates in 2007; 95,446 for drug offenses. State prisons held a total of 1,296,700 inmates in 2005; 253,300 for drug offenses. Sixty percent of the drug offenders in prisons are nonviolent and were purely in prison because of drug offenses (Drug War Facts). The question then arises,

As of 2015, 2.7% of adults in the United States were under correctional control, the lowest rate since 1994, however that is still roughly 6.7 million adults (Kaeble & Glaze, 2016). While the correctional population has declined, correctional facilities in the United States are still grossly overcrowded, with many facilities at or surpassing capacity. A report in 2010 by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation showed that on average, facilities were at 175% capacity (Brown, 2010). However, as of midnight on October 31st, 2017 the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation reported that their facilities, on average, were 132% occupied (Brown, 2017). Not only is prison overcrowding a burden on the facilities themselves, but also on the inmates. Prison overcrowding, that is, housing more inmates than the facility can humanely facilitate (Haney, 2006), places a strain on all resources throughout the correctional facility, including on the healthcare that’s offered, educational programs, and most dramatically on the physical space available to house inmates (Ekland-Olson, 1983).

Since the declaration of “the war on drugs”, society’s perspective relating to punishment of drug-involved offenders has been much too vindictive. Now, an offender is not allowed to be sent to treatment by a judge, he must go to jail. This is due to mandatory sentencing. Upcoming diversion programs are an excellent alternative to “hard time” for qualifying drug offenders. These programs are becoming very popular and evidence shows that they are greatly beneficial, not only to the accused, but to society as a whole. Diversion programs benefit many regarding the increase in community involvement and safer city streets, rehabilitation of offenders, and financial means. The criminal justice system is currently at a stand still in regards to convicted

The War on Drugs is one cause for the mass incarceration that has become apparent within the United States. This refers to a drastic amount of people being imprisoned for mainly non-violent crime (“Mass Incarceration” 2016). In addition to people who are not an immediate threat to society being locked up for a substantial duration of time, the economic consequences are costing states and taxpayers millions of dollars. Specifically, every one in five people incarcerated is in prison due to some

The overcrowding prison reflects that the inmate population has grown much faster than the funding for prisons, which is controlled at the state level. In most cases, state funding has not come close to keeping up with the rise in the prison population, leading to decrepit prison infrastructure that is wholly inadequate for housing such large numbers of inmates. Without capacity to house inmates properly, some prisons have resorted to having prisoners sleep in gymnasiums, and many have overcrowded cells to accommodate the extra bodies. This overcrowding has led to deteriorating cleanliness of prisons and declining safety. Today, non-violent prisoners are forced to live in close quarters with violent ones, and the results are predictable.

The United States incarcerates more people, per capita, than any other nation in the entire world. State and local prisons and jails account for about 80% of incarcerations. Although crime rates have decreased since the 1990s, incarceration rates have soared. According to a recent Prison Policy Initiative publication, approximately 2.3 million people are currently “locked up” in the United States. Of these 2.3 million people, 1 in 5 are locked up for a drug related offense. Statistics show that prisoners and felons imprisoned for drug related crimes are disproportionately Black and Hispanic. The mass incarceration issue in the United States derives from the many arrests associated with these “offenses” regarding drugs and the war on drugs.

In the 1970s and 1980s, a massive amount of inmates began fillin up the United States prison systems. This huge rate of growth in this short amount of time, has greatly contributed to the prison overcrowding that the United States faces today. In fact, the prisons are still filled to the seams. This enormous flood of inmates has made it practically impossible for prison officials to keep up with their facilities and supervise their inmates. One of the main reasons why many prisons have become overcrowded is because of states’ harsh criminal laws and parole practices (Cohen). “One in every 100 American adults is behind bars, the highest incarceration rate in the world” (Cohen). The amount of inmates in corrections systems, throughout the

When the term corrections is mentioned, the thought of incarceration is the first to come to mind. This is the case for as of the end of 2013, there were 1,574,700 people serving time in state and federal penitentiaries (Carson, 2014, p.1). This alarming number gives reason for the need of alternatives to incarceration. Avoiding imprisonment does not translate to a lenient punitive sentence for the alternatives can just as easily repair harms to the victims, provide benefits to the community, treat the drug addicted, and rehabilitate offenders (FAMM, 2013, p.1). The use of programs that offer an alternative to incarceration can reduce the amount of people in the prison system that is living on taxpayers’ dollars.

A social reformer, a civil philanthropist, and a judge by the name of James(Jim) Gray, strongly believes that no matter how loose or strict prosecutors are on drug offenders the war on drugs is going to continue until the United States can realize that the only way to solve the drug addiction problem in America is to realize that we must rehabilitate and treat drug offenders and addicts in order to prevent and eliminate drug related violence and crime(Gray, J. P. 2011. pp. 19-20). Judge Gray continues on to state that we must see and treat drug users as human beings, which according to judge Gray most Americans do not do this. Judge Gray stated that the zero tolerance policy that we have here in the United States allows little to no room

We have recently seen a change in the way that drug abuse and addiction are viewed. Considering addiction to be a chronic and relapsing disease is a new concept for the public, policymakers, and even health care professionals (Leshner 46). With this in mind, we can recognize that corrections without the benefit of treatment will fall short in correcting drug-seeking and addictive behaviors (Leshner 46). These, of course, are also the behaviors that most often cause an individual to return to crimes that promote their drug use upon leaving jail or prison (Leshner

The United States Correctional System is often challenged as to whether it wants to rehabilitate drug offenders or punish them, and because of this it mostly does neither. Even though drug abuse and drug trafficking are widely spread national issues, the mental, social, and economic costs of "healing" through incarceration are only making the "disease" worse. Never before have more prisoners been locked up on drug offenses than today. Mixed with the extremely high risks of today's prison environment, the concept of incarceration as punishment for drug offenders cannot be successful. Without the correct form of rehabilitation through treatment within Michigan's Correctional System, drug

Those incarcerated today are not given the chance to change their behavior patterns, especially when it is in regard to drug addiction. The criminal justice system in general does not consider drug abuse as anything but a crime and does not think about treating the disease of addiction in order to reduce or eliminate the crimes that come as a

Historically, those of a drug or substance abuse are thought of as criminals and given prison terms for their addiction. With the current Heroin epidemic, our prisons are filling-up, costing taxpayers approximately $30,000 a year, per prisoner (msnbc). In particular, Licking County has seen a 47% increase from 2014, in the number of drug overdoses (Bruner, 2016). With such statistics, I find that instead of incarceration, these individuals should be sentenced a court ordered rehabilitation. By doing so, we would be shifting from a criminal issue to a public health issue. Instead of the large amount of taxpayers’ money used for incarceration, we could use such funds to support drug treatment programs, which show stronger record of success. MSNBC states that every dollar invested in drug treatment saves taxpayers more than $18 in crime-related societal costs. My one concern regarding this policy is the safety of the public. However, I find that such sentence should only be granted to those who are nonviolent, or have no previous criminal history. In addition, I find that drug trafficking or the selling of drugs should result in a more serious/harsh sentence. With the help of important stakeholders, I hope to implement this policy with positive outcomes including survivors living a healthy and fulfilling life, through a

Over the past few years the merit of placing criminals who have committed a nonviolent crime in jail has been heavily contested. Upon further research, I found a majority of people believe that these offenders do deserve punishment, but not to the extent of jail time. The reasoning of this greatly varies, but two main arguments against their incarceration are the high cost of keeping a man in jail, and the high incarceration rate already in place. Thus, to resolve the problem of an astronomical mass incarceration rate, nonviolent drug criminals should warrant little to no jail time.

One of the most profound problems that plagues our society is drug addiction. With drug addiction comes those who offend and have run-ins with the law. Our country deals with these drug-addicted offenders by placing them in jails for a year or longer, only to have them come back out to society when their sentence is over. They are still drug-addicts and so they return to the street only to commit yet another crime. From here the cycle of crime, arrest, jail, and return to society continues, solving absolutely nothing. Therefore, placing drug-addicted offenders in jails fails to confront the major problem at hand which is that of the drug abuse. If drug-addicted offenders were placed in drug treatment centers instead of being incarcerated,