Incarceration over Treatment?

In the midst of my concussion, locked up in my room, only being able to listen to podcasts, I discovered something. I was listening to this woman talk about how she is a recovering heroin addict on a podcast called “Beautiful Stories of Anonymous People”, where people anonymously call in and talk with the host, Chris Gethard. She told countless, crazy, insane, beautiful stories about her addiction, how she got there and how she ultimately recovered. The woman briefly mentioned to Gethard how she had been to jail a few times for addiction and possession of drugs. It didn’t strike me as anything out of the ordinary, until she added that jail didn’t help at all, and if anything had the opposite effect. She then started to explain that being in jail actually enabled her as an addict even more. She told how it got her even more addicted and how she actually made numerous amounts of contacts to get drugs from when she got out of jail. It took going to rehab and help from her family to actually stop using drugs and change her life.

When it comes down to it, it seems absolutely crazy that we, as a nation would send drug addicts to jail. What’s the use? To punish them? To hope they get better by being punished? Punishment does nothing, as exemplified from the girl on the podcast. When incarcerating someone, at least from what I know, it makes the person being punished even angrier, there’s no treatment involved, it’s pure punishment.

The Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse, better known as CASA, completed a study in 2010 that found that only 11% of inmates with substance abuse received any treatment during their stay in prison. That means that 89%, yes 89% of inmates received absolutely no treatment. That sounds crazy to me, I mean, they are suffering from a drug addiction, and doing nothing to help that will in the long run just make their situation worse. The CASA report also found that drug abusers who were incarcerated once are more likely to be re-incarcerated again, 41% more likely to have had family criminal history, 29% less likely to have completed at least high school and 20% likelier to be unemployed a month before incarceration. Now these statistics can all be insights on why one may use drugs, however incarcerating a drug addict does absolutely nothing to help.

My question is why does the justice system incarcerate drug addicts instead of treat them? One way of looking at this is to talk about the fact that prisons are privatized and make money through people coming into prison. So, when making the decision to send someone to prison, the judges and government are aware that sending them into prison will just be more money for them to profit off of; they’re not looking at the personal life of each of these drug addicts, many times the goal is to just get as many people as they can into prison so they can make money.

Another reason addicts are punished instead of treated is because in many cases, arrests tend to be bias and police officers commit a fair amount of racial profiling, which then leads the justice system to incarcerate more blacks than white because of a racial bias. As Michelle Alexander talks about in the book, The New Jim Crow, we haven’t ended racism, it is just redesigned. There are still many people out there who see black people as a threat to humanity and would like to see them gone. Rather than treating a black person, many people would much rather lock them up, which is why the war on drugs started in the first place. President Nixon’s domestic policy chief, John Ehrlichman said “We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities...Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did." The war on drugs was just a way to mass incarcerate black people, therefore the last thing the government and the justice system wanted was to treat them.

It is terrifyingly sad to me that to profit or to get rid of a whole race the system would use incarceration rather than treatment for people who truly need it. It is so crazy how far the system and government will go to profit and create the best situation for them, not for everyone. I think they forget that people are people and they deserve to be treated like so.

Picture

http://www.davegranlund.com/cartoons/wp-content/uploads/US-prison-system.jpg

References

Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow. New York: The New Press, 2012. Print.

King, Shaun. “The ‘War on Drugs’ is essentially just a war on black people in America”. Daily News. 23rd, March 2016. http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/king-war-drugs-war-black-people-article-1.2574719

“New CASA report finds: 65% of all U.S. inmates meet medical criteria for substance abuse addiction, only 11% receive any treatment”. The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse. http://www.centeronaddiction.org/newsroom/press-releases/2010-behind-bars-II