Drug Addiction: Treatment or Incarceration?

A study completed by the Justice Policy Institute shows that providing drug offenders with treatment is a more cost-effective way of dealing with substance addicted drug and nonviolent offenders than prison.

"Narconon Drug Rehab in Georgia was started as an alternative to incarceration," comments Mary Rieser, Executive Director. "Instead of incarcerating someone suffering from drug addiction, they did our program and did well. Drug addiction does not mean a life of suffering or incarceration. It can be succesfully addressed.

"Nationwide, studies by the nation’s leading criminal justice research agencies, including the RAND Corporation, the Center for Substance Abuse Treatment of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the Little Hoover Commission, the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University have shown that drug treatment, in concert with other services and programs, is a more cost effective way to deal with drug offenders."

Drug treatment offers several benefits:

It is cost-effective.

Drug treatment in prison—such as in-prison therapeutic community programming, or that
same program with community aftercare after the person leaves prison—yields a benefit of
between $1.91 and $2.69 for every dollar spent on them.

By contrast, therapeutic community programs outside of prison—typically work release facilities—yielded $8.87 ofbenefit for every program dollar spent. The reason for the difference versus in prison treatment programs was mainly due to higher program completion rates and lower recidivism. In writing of the non-prison therapeutic community option, WSIPP writes “the economics of this approach appear quite attractive.”

Other kinds of non-prison programs also yielded significant benefits. Community-based substance abuse treatment generated $3.30 of benefit for every dollar spent, while drug courts yielded $2.83 for every dollar spent. Treatment oriented intensive supervision programs yielded $2.45 worth of benefit for every dollar spent, and was far more cost effective than simple supervision alone.

RAND found that drug treatment is a more cost effective way of achieving the goal of reducing drug abuse than arresting and incarcerating our way out of our society’s drug problem.

This treatment-alternative-to-incarceration model saves large amounts of money—savings of up to $22,500 per offender per year.

It reduces crime.

The ADAA reports that the people in its treatment programs commit fewer crimes.
“Arrest rates during treatment were substantially lower than arrest rates during the two
years preceding treatment, and completion of treatment was associated with the greatest
reductions in arrest rates.”

According to the federal NTIES report, offenders who went through treatment showed a
nearly two-thirds decline in overall arrests and an over 50% drop in drug possession
arrests. More importantly, criminal behavior—self-reported to NTIES by these former
offenders which did not necessarily result in arrest—also declined. “The results show
substantial, and statistically significant, reductions in both criminal behavior and arrests
after treatment, with a somewhat smaller decrease in the percentage of clients mostly
supported through illegal activities."

It reduces recidivism.

While research by the US Justice Department shows that while two-thirds of drug offenders leaving state prison will be re-arrested within three years (almost the same rate as for all inmates), and that nearly half of released drug offenders will be returned to prison either through a technical violation of their sentence—such as failing a drug test—or on a new sentence, the percentage of drug rehab clients arrested for drug possession declined by 51 percent while the percentage arrested for any charge declined by 64 percent. Changes in criminal behavior were larger, between seventy and ninety percent.

While imprisoning offenders may provide comfort to some in terms of public safety, it does
little to reduce the cluster of issues which will see these people cycle in and out of the
nation’s corrections system. What is needed is a solution less costly than building more
prisons and more effective at reducing recidivism. The good news is, the solution already
exists.

Call Narconon Drug Rehab in Georgia at 1-877-413-3073
      
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