Crime and Punishment

TREATMENT OR TIME?

FREDDIE Freeloader has been arrested again for peddling and using drugs.
Under the zero-tolerance law and maximum sentencing requirements, he's good
for five years in the slammer. Freddie's annual room and board will cost
more than tuition for two at Mizzou. Is that a good use of taxpayers' money?

Prisons are the only option for violent criminals. But they shouldn't be
the automatic choice for those who commit nonviolent crimes. Many of them
are behind bars because common sense lost out to anti-drug hysteria in the
1990s, when lawmakers began a zero-tolerance crusade to rid communities of
crack. If Missouri's prison population continues to grow by four or five
inmates every day, building new prisons to hold them all will be
exorbitantly expensive.

Missouri should consider cheaper alternatives, like sending nonviolent
offenders to drug treatment programs instead of prison. That would still
cost taxpayers money, but a new study shows that treatment programs cost
half as much as prison. In addition to curbing addiction, some
comprehensive treatment programs include mandatory job training. That's in
contrast to the experience of many unskilled inmates who come out of prison
and dive back into the street lifestyle that put them behind bars.

In Brooklyn, N.Y., a program called Drug Treatment Alternative-to-Prison
has been highly successful since it was set up in 1990 to deal with a flood
of crack cocaine offenders. Its participants were 67 percent less likely to
return to prison two years after leaving the program. Those who
successfully completed it also were more than three times as likely to get
jobs as those not in the program, according to a study by Columbia
University's Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse.

Unlike drug court defendants, the Brooklyn suspects were allowed to enter
treatment in lieu of prosecution. If a suspect completes the program, which
might last for two years or more, the offense is removed from his record.
If the suspect drops out or commits another crime, the prosecutor seeks the
mandatory sentence. The threat of jail time becomes a powerful incentive
for drug users to accept treatment and job training, according to Joseph
Califano, who heads Columbia's addiction center.

Brooklyn's prosecutor, Charles Hynes, says it's "fiscally and morally
indefensible to send people to jail for their addiction." Even if Missouri
lawmakers don't buy the moral part of that argument, they should embrace
the fiscal one.