Drug Use Dilemmas

Many different states have begun sending nonviolent drug offenders to various kinds of drug treatment program the state offers. By doing this, it has significantly reduced the problems with overcrowding. If an individual is arrested and charged with simple possession of a drug and no other crime is being commented, then this person is doing no harm to anyone else. They should be given the opportunity to try and make a change in their life and beat the addiction. Instead, if this person is thrown into jail, they are still going to be an addict with a criminal record now and will not be able to be a contributing member of society. (Everett 1 ).

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 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.

Although the determination of a cost benefit ratio for SACPA is beyond the scope of the available data, the savings of $2317 per offender allows us to project about $97.3 million in savings over the long term for the nearly 42,000 offenders affected during the first year of SACPA implementation (Anglin et al. 2013). Given such a substantial finding suggests that moving drug offenders from the correctional system and

There are currently over two million people in our nation 's state and federal prisons and jails. Nearly one and a half million of these offenders occupy state and federal prisons, serving over a year in detention for felonies.(1) The most alarming statistic is the fact that the United States houses twenty five percent of the world 's inmates. A good percentage of these convicts are serving time for drug crimes, most of which are first time,

We must enact policies that downscale the prison population. The best approach is to shift resources away from the incarceration and punishment of certain inmate categories, such as nonviolent drug offenders, investing instead in their rehabilitation. Though correction systems have historically favored punishment over ‘softer’ rehabilitation, most nonviolent, drug-related offenders would benefit more from rehabilitation than incarceration. Today, in great part as a consequence of the War on Drugs, our prisons house over half a million drug offenders, representing over one-half of the federal inmate population in the United States, an increase of 790 percent since 1980. It is time for new leadership on the War on Drugs which has cost billions of dollars and has caused the endangerment of inmates’ and correctional officers’ lives due to mass incarceration. Do we wish to continue being the most punitive developed country in the world? Instead of implementing mandatory

Once the individual is infatuated with one or more drugs it is viewed as an addiction, but programs such as the F.I.S.T program consider it to be a disease. This specific program takes those diseased who are willing to get clean and want to be reintegrated into society as a law abiding citizen. Many have argued that drug court programs do not focus enough on the participant’s life outside of the program after his or her graduation. A recent study researched the success of the after effects this program had against offenders who were eligible and entered the program versus those who were eligible and did not enter. With the F.I.S.T program, participants received therapeutic tools and rigorous education compared to those who did not. With this study, out of the 186 individuals who participated, only 10 of them were rearrested after the first 6 months. The counter research of the 994 who did not participate, had 108 individuals be re-arrested after the first 6 months. Once the one year or more re arrest comparison between the two were calculated, it was found that completers of this program are 16% less likely to recidivate to drug offenses than those who did not complete F.I.S.T. The reason behind these finding were the teachings the participants were exposed to during the process. With educational programs, they discovered what they were

More than 45 years ago President Richard Nixon announced and declared the nation is at war, that war was the "War on Drugs". Nancy Reagan campaigned heavily in the fight against drug use as well; her fight was that of teaching young children the slogan of “Just Say No”. The goals of the criminal justice system in the war on drugs have been a never ending fight against the sale of illicit drugs and that of combating drug abuse. We will discuss the increased resources spent on law enforcement and rehabilitation while making an attempt in understanding

For over a century, America has waged a failing war on drugs even as it feeds a cultural apathetic and underground acceptance of drug and alcohol use. The views of the dominate group have placed blame on society’s ills on the evils of rampant drug use throughout the past few hundred years, which have given way to a practice of outlawing , persecution, and imprisonment. Such a view has led to the overflow of our state’s prisons, the race to build even more, and need to

The number of people incarcerated in America has steeply risen since the beginning of the War on Drugs. In 1980, about 300,000 individuals were in jail. (Alexander, 2010) In 2000, the number rose to over one million, and at the start of 2008, there were 2.3 million adults in prison in America (Pew Center on the States, 2008). These increases in the rate of incarceration are traceable to the War on Drugs (Nunn, 2001). “Convictions for drug offenses are the single most important cause of the explosion in incarceration in the United States (Alexander, 2010).” Drug offenses account for two thirds of the rise in the federal prison population between 1985 and 2000 (Nunn, 2001).

Drug abuse is shown to be connected to all different kinds of crime in the United States, and in many circumstances, crime is inspired by drug abuse and addiction. In fact, 80% of criminal offenders abuse drugs or alcohol (National Association of Drug Court Professionals). Also, 60% of those who are arrested test positive for illicit drugs when they are arrested, and 60-80% commit another crime, typically drug-related, after leaving prison (National Association of Drug Court Professionals). And, even after these individuals put in the time in prison that would allow them to go through the uncomfortable process of detoxing, 95% of them will chose to go back to drug abuse after prison (National Association of Drug Court Professionals). Given these overwhelming statistics, it is clear that drug abuse, and repeated or continued drug abuse, are a serious problem facing the criminal justice system.

Today in the United States a land that claims to be the freest nation on the face of the Earth more people will wake up inside of a federal/state prison or a county jail cell than in any other country on the planet. As of 2012 this figure was a staggering 2,228,400 (jail 744,500; prison 1,483,900) add in to this the additional sum of just over 5 million people on parole (851,200) and probation (3,942,800) giving us a grand total of over 7 million citizens under some level of Federal or State supervision (Glaze and Herberman). This is up from only 1,840,421 in 1980 a percentage increase of 281.56% (Glaze and Herberman). As of 2012 over half of the inmates in the federal prison system (50.6%) were incarcerated for drug charges (Caron and Golinelli) while according to 2011 statistics just under 17% of state prisoners were locked away for offenses related to illegal substances (Carson and Sabol). The cost of maintaining this level of incarceration is in all honesty a tremendous burden upon both our justice system and our tax base. If you were to go to the website www.drugsense.org you would see their drug war clock which increases by $500 every second based upon the National Drug Control Policy’s 2010 statistics (Drugsense.org). The country needs to make serious changes in order to alleviate this Promethean like burden that has been placed on our tax payers and our infrastructure. Our system desperately needs reform in order to rescue society from these metaphorical

In the early to mid-1980, there was a drug epidemic in urban cities across the nation. As a result of this, Congress created the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, which gave drug offenders a higher sentence in the criminal justice system. Over the past thirty years, the United States has seen an unprecedented rise in the rate of incarceration. Between the years 1972-2000, the rate of incarceration has risen at an astonishing rate of 500%. This act in particular, had no toleration towards these offenses, consequently leading to the disappearance of probation “federal courts sentenced [twenty-six] percent of convicted drug offenders to probation. By 2014, the proportion had fallen to [six] percent, with judges sending nearly all drug offenders to prison” (“Public Safety Performance”). Not only has the rate of incarceration increased so has the sentences for these offences “from 1980 to 2011, the average prison sentence imposed on drug offenders increased [three] percent—from 54.6 to 74.2 months—even as it declined [three] percent for all other offenders” (“Public Safety Performance Project”). This leads to the larger issue in the incarceration system, which is that penalties do not match the offenses. With the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 in practice, it influenced the establishment of a five-year mandatory minimum for small drug traffickers. If a

Drug courts are considered to be one of the most successful innovations to be implemented in the criminal justice system. It was first implemented during the height of the drug war hysteria and the long epidemic of the skyrocketing rates of incarceration. According to the Bureau of Justice Assistance (2010), drug courts are a “specially designed court docket, whose purpose is to achieve a reduction in recidivism and substance abuse among nonviolent substance abusing offenders and to increase the offender’s likelihood of successful habilitation through, continuous, and intense judicially supervised treatment, mandatory periodic drug testing, community supervision, and use of appropriate sanctions and other rehabilitation services”. Drug Courts were first launched in 1989 by the Miami-Dade County area of Florida. A local prosecutor by the name of Janet Reno and a few other criminal justice professionals grew tired of seeing the same faces and same cases reappear in court so their solution to the problem was to combine drug treatment within the court-like structure. The number of drug courts since then have proliferated to nearly 3,400 across the United States as of June 2014 (NIJ, 2015). More than half target adults and a growing number of juveniles, families, veterans, and various other case types. The innovation of drug courts alters how the court system handles and monitors drug involved cases and integrates the treatment aspect into their primary goals.

Drug abuse and crime is not a new concept and the statistics around the problem have continued to rise. According to (Office of Justice Programs, 2011), there were an estimated 1,846,400 state and local arrests for drug abuse in the United States. Additionally, 17 percent of state prisoners and 18 percent of federal inmates said they committed their current offense to obtain money for drugs (Office of Justice Programs, 2011). Based on this information, we can conclude that our criminal justice systems are saturated with drug abusers. The United States has the highest imprisonment rate and about 83 percent of arrests are for possession of illegal drugs (Prisons & Drug Offenders, 2011). Based on these figures, I can conclude that we should be more concerned about solving the drug abusers problems and showing them an alternative lifestyle rather than strict penalty of long term incarceration which will inevitably challenge their ability to be fully functioning citizens after release.