TREATING DRUG OFFENDERS SAVES DOLLARS

The bad news this year is that Texas is facing the prospect of cutting
education, social services and health care to poor and working class
families at the same time that the state's corrections budget has topped
$2.5 billion annually.

The good news is that, facing the largest budget shortfall in any of their
political lives, some state legislators are looking creatively at ways to
save money and improve public safety.

What Texas policy-makers are proposing is innovative and likely to divert
low-level, nonviolent offenders from costly imprisonment into treatment and
supervision.

Indeed, if the proposed policies are enacted into law, states across the
country may look to the "Texas model" for saving money and achieving better
outcomes that favor treatment over incarceration for nonviolent offenders.

Successful criminal justice reform already had begun in Texas before the
introduction of any of this year's legislation.

The state began its commitment to substance abuse treatment with landmark
legislation in 1991. That treatment has provided services to tens of
thousands of offenders who have stayed out of prison.

In the last several years, parole reforms have been enacted
administratively and have resulted in higher rates of parole through the
use of an objective screening method and fewer technical (noncriminal)
violations of parole through the use of alternative forms of punishment.
Had it not been for those reforms, Texas prisons already would have run out
of room, and today's $9.9 billion budget shortfall would be even higher.

Buoyed by the success of those reforms, legislators carefully have analyzed
Texas' prison population and crafted a series of bills that would reduce
sentences for certain nonviolent offenders, provide respite for crowded
county jails, give low-level offenders full credit for good time and create
treatment opportunities for those offenders who are diverted from prison or
jail.

One bill, filed by both Republican and Democratic legislators, would
downgrade possession of less than a gram of drugs. Meanwhile, a companion
bill would see to it that drug courts were made broadly available to such
offenders.

Viewed from both an economic and a public safety standpoint, the choice
between prison and substance abuse treatment for many nonviolent offenders
whose crimes are drug-related should be easy.

An increasing body of research completed since the start of the "war on
drugs" indicates that a rational cost-benefit calculation favors treatment
hands down:

* A landmark Rand Corp. study comparing the benefits of different law
enforcement strategies to treatment for heavy users of cocaine found that
treatment is three times as effective as mandatory minimum prison sentences.

* A study by the California Department of Alcohol and Drug Programs found
that for every tax dollar invested in treatment, taxpayers saved seven
dollars in future crime- and health-related costs.

* A national evaluation of individuals in publicly funded treatment
programs found that drug use dropped by 41 percent in the year after
treatment - while the proportion of individuals selling drugs dropped by 78
percent and the proportion arrested on any charge dropped by 64 percent.

* A five-year study released by the National Center on Addiction and
Substance Abuse found that participants who completed an alternative drug
treatment program were 33 percent less likely to be arrested, 45 percent
less likely to be convicted again and 87 percent less likely to return to
prison than the comparable group sent to prison.

To be sure, if this package of bills is enacted into law this year, the job
of reforming Texas' prison system, one of the largest and most expensive in
the world, will be far from complete.

But faced with an unprecedented fiscal crisis and a prison system that
incarcerates 72,000 nonviolent offenders at a cost of more than $20,000 per
inmate per year, Texas legislators are off to a good start by taking a
best-practices, nonpartisan approach to returning some balance to Texas'
criminal justice system.

Michele Deitch is director of the Austin-based Center for Criminal Justice
Initiatives, a criminal justice policy consulting firm. Vincent Schiraldi,
president of the Justice Policy Institute, a research and public policy
organization in Washington, contributed to this column.