Balancing Public Safety with Fiscal Responsibility
Levin notes that drug courts cost 75% less than incarceration. “It currently costs about $18,300 annually per prisoner, while drug courts cost about $3,000.” This means that drug court can process about six drug offenders for the cost of one incarceration.
Reddy says that drug courts pay for themselves. “Using drug courts in lieu of criminal prosecution and incarceration saves money. Because they’ve been successful, we now have extra prison beds. In Texas, all three budget proposals (governor, Senate, House) include shutting some prison space down. There’s no reason to direct tax dollars towards them when they’re not needed.”
As for being tough on crime, Levin and Reddy say drug courts require personal responsibility. Chemical dependency treatment is usually mandatory, as is restitution. Staying out of prison offers many positive motives: e.g., remaining with family, being able to work, not losing voting rights.
Levin says one important difference between drug courts and regular probation is that a judge oversees the drug court probationer, instead of a probation officer who may have a heavy caseload. The judge has the ability to deliver immediate consequences, such as revoking probation or referring to treatment. This immediate feedback lends itself to reinforcing the message of personal responsibility.
Returning to victims’ rights, being put on probation via drug court can have a positive outcome as well. For example, in Texas, probationers paid $46.8 million in restitution in 2008, compared to $501,000 by inmates and $1.2 million by parolees.
Reddy says drug courts are a diversion program to offer a way to stay out of prison. Levin says depending on the situation, in-patient or out-patient treatment programs are both valid options. Both note that if the offender declines court-ordered treatment, the judge can revoke probation/deferment immediately.
Levin notes: “Many drug courts only take first time offenders. They do a risk assessment and see who’s appropriate for diversion.”
Reddy sees drug court as a way to keep juvenile drug offenders out of the prison system, where they risk becoming hardened criminals and costing society even more: “About 50% of all high school students have tried an illegal drug. We want to reduce that figure without incarcerating 50% of high school students.”
Reddy believes options like drug courts are a win-win: “People often leave prison worse than before they went in. Prisons are graduate schools for crime. Regardless of the analytical model you use, it’s clearly less expensive to limit recidivism, as more offenders become productive members of society.”
Let’s legalize the drugs, but make all public assistance and public employment conditional on passing a drug test.
Um, looks like cost shifting, an arbitrage play on the purported differential savings between a local cheaper medical model versus expensive state penitentiary model for dealing with “hypes.” Well, if it works so good, why hasn’t it worked in California with their mental health recidivism rates? Remember all those state hospitals–the “snake pits”–that were closed down in the ’60s and ’70s with the “patients” released to their local communities for mental health interventions? Problem is the state pocketed the savings while the local communities didn’t have the money to provide the local intervention for the growing population of “nuts”–unless it was jail for a new beef; so the “nuts” live on the streets until a criminal code is violated and the mental health intervention happens in the expensive local jails and lockups. Yeah, I can see it now; “normal” families, after kicking their dope fiend son’s and daughters out of the house so as not to be enablers, will want to reconnect with their program failing, serial stealing, dope fiend son’s and daughters over whom the parents have no control once they reach the age of 18. Yeah, looks like real quality family time with Harriet the hype and hoe. Want to save money? How about legalize dope, tax it, and no drug courts? For the new drug related crimes do public floggings in lieu of expensive incarceration. Oh, and fast track death penalty cases; surely if President Lincoln’s killers could be tried, convicted, and executed in 90 days in the age of candles and the horse and buggy, surely we can execute a child killer in one year in the internet age? May I suggest a constitutional amendment? No new supreme court civil cases can be heard–Roe V. Wade etc— in the current year until the death penalty back log is cleared for the previous thirty years, meaning they’re all executed or released, which ever comes first.
Having lived in California for 18 years, I concluded that personal responsibility isn’t important there. In this article, the sources discuss the imperative nature of personal responsibility to succeed via the drug court process. In California, everybody is a victim, and only the nanny state can do what all the permanently helpless children cannot accomplish for themselves. California also has an extremely strong prison guards’ union, which is far more interested in gaining more power and numbers than supporting a solution that costs maybe 25% of incarceration, but requires no guards. Plus, by cycling drug offenders through prison, it raises the likelihood of recidivism, which again will require more prisons and guards.
It isn’t just the guards, it’s the entire “judicial-industrial complex,” of which they are just one cog. It starts with the police, sheriffs and other LEOs. On the next rung are the DAs, defense lawyers, bail bondsmen, judges, bailiffs, court clerks and jailers. At the top are those unionized state prison guards, along with the wardens, construction companies and all the various vendors (food service, etc.). All of the above depend on high crime rates to justify their ever-increasing budgets and/or keep their jobs. (In the suburban county where I live, the sheriff’s office devours nearly half of all county revenues.)
Ever wondered why, after a citizen heroically uses deadly force to stop a crime the local police chief or sheriff whines, “Yeah, this time it turned out OK, but it’s still a bad idea. Everyone should just give in to the criminal’s demands and then call 911,” when all that does is embolden the thugs and lead to even more crime? Now you know. And now you also know why the police unions led the charge to defeat last November’s referendum in California to decriminalize marijuana.
Always remember, law-enforcement bigwigs are nothing more than bureaucrats with badges, who will do anything to increase their budgets, and therefore their power. In their case, crime = money. Several years ago a ruckus erupted in some small Iowa town when the city council, bemoaning the lack of “diversity,” proposed importing large numbers of blacks. No way to prove it, of course, but I’d lay 10-1 odds that the “Wormtongue” whispering that nonsense in the council’s ears was none other than the police chief.
Actually my county in CA has a drug court, and it does save money and salvages lives. Nothing is perfect but it has made a difference. I have no idea how its statistics might align with those quoted here from TX, but I suspect it would be similar. Crazy, huh? Something in CA that works. Who’d a thunk it?
The problem is that it is getting more and more difficult for an ex-offender who wants to “go straight” to get any kind of a job.
It is difficult enough to find work for those of us who are NOT ex-offenders.
Why employers avoid hiring the long-term unemployed
By diverting into drug court, first-time drug offenders avoid the stigma of being convicts. If they succeed in drug court, they’re not prosecuted. No conviction, no record, easier employment.
Prison has to be a last resort, for cost reasons alone, never mind the destructive effects that it has on convicts for whom there is at least some hope of reform. When I lived in California, I found the contrast between California and Georgia quite astonishing. For first offense burglary, reactionary Georgia was using electronic monitored home arrest–while progressive California was sending them to prison. Of course, that prison guard union might have something to do with it.
Criminalization of addicts is wrong. There is almost no hope of recovery in prison. It would actually save money to use drug court and fund treatment programs for drug offenders.
I have no respect for politicians, judges and police who arrest people with an addiction and allow the dealers to remain on the streets, which is commonly the case.
Possession, in an amount for personal use, should at most be a misdemeanor, not a felony. Having a felony record doesn’t give much incentive, or encouragement to clean up.
Change the laws.
One way to reduce prison costs is to enforce the death penalty. I don’t mean decades waiting to be executed either.
Bring back the true right of “Right to bear arms”. If we are all armed, less crime.
Prosecute and execute any drug dealer selling more than a kilo of drugs.
Reestablish family values. Less people wanting drugs, the less demand.
Hooray for drug courts community courts and various other programs. These and all programs are PART of the solution. They’re not THE solution.
It seems that conservatives have jumped on the anti-incarceration bandwagon. To say that we rely too much or only on incarceration implies we need to rely more on “alternatives to incarceration.” According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics at the end of 2009 we had 1,613,740 people in prison throughout our country. We also had 5,023,275 people on community supervision or so called alternatives. If the goal is to put fewer people in prison and more people in “alternatives”, MISSION ACCOMPLISHED. We have more than 70% of our corrections population in the community. In some states it’s as high as 80%. Some may say we should increase it to 80% nation-wide but if we do we’ll basically end up with what we now have–as system in which the VAST majority of offenders is in community programs/supervision rather than in prison.
Fixing the system through prison reform misses the entirety of the problem. The system doesn’t need to be reformed. It must be TRANSFORMED.
We shouldn’t jump to the answers before asking the right questions.
We’re told that prisons hold a large number of non-violent offenders. This raises several questions. Should we only incarcerate violent offenders? What about car thieves, burglars, drug dealers, swindlers and others? Should we never incarcerate these types of criminals? What exactly is a non-violent offender? Is it someone who has never committed a violent crime? Is it someone convicted of a non-violent crime but with a history of violence? Is it someone who committed a violent crime but was convicted of a non-violent crime because of plea bargaining? The point is that sentencing statistics provide only a snapshot of the person’s current offense.
We rely on a flawed success measure-recidivism. This also raises several questions. If a person hasn’t returned to prison, is it because they’ve reformed or is it because they haven’t gotten caught? Perhaps an individual was rearrested in another jurisdiction but as long as he/she doesn’t return to the institution of release it’s counted as a success. Reliance on recidivism creates unintended consequences. Probation and parole officers are often instructed not to revoke supervision unless (until) a person commits a “serious” offense. Many major offenses can be prevented by revoking individuals at the first sign of trouble-usually after a “minor” infraction. To do so would be considered a failure in today’s system. Does this make any sense? Offenders can avoid rearrest and conviction while continuing to wreak havoc in the community.