ADDICTS IN WAITING: HIGH COSTS TO STATE IN CUTTING PRISON DRUG TREATMENT

Last year, more than a quarter of the 23,731 men and women who went to
prison in Florida were hooked either on drugs or alcohol. Twenty-nine
percent of inmates in that freshman class were convicted of drug offenses.
That's been the story for 10 years. The war on drugs has redefined the sick
behavior of addicts into crimes punishable by harsh sentences while turning
prisons into overpopulated gulags. That war hobbles on with nothing
resembling a victory in sight.

The Florida Department of Corrections has just designed a devastating new
defeat for itself, for the state treasury and most of all for inmates who
could have been helped. The department is eliminating drug treatment
programs at all but four of Florida's 55 prisons. Federal matching grants
will keep the programs alive at the remaining four. The department is also
slashing by a third follow-up drug treatment that helps inmates once
they're back in society.

The department will thus spend $13 million less. But to call that a
"saving" is an insult to taxpayers and to the state's own rabid history of
drug-war rhetoric. For years lawmakers and prison officials have applauded
harsher drug sentencing laws. Drug addicts commit a disproportionate number
of property crimes, they argued, costing society billions each year. But
locking them up only to release them back to their addictions and their
property crimes only puts additional costs to society on lay-away.

If it has always made more sense to treat an addict than to lock him up,
treatment in lock-up was one of those compromises between the drug war's
doves and hawks. Treatment programs flourished in the 1990s (after the
1980s fashion of locking drug offenders behind bars and indifference).

Results were heartening. Prison Journal examined a series of studies in
1999 that looked at drug treatment in prisons in California, Delaware and
Texas. Out of 1,461 inmates, a quarter of those given intensive treatment
in prison and after their release were again in prison three years later,
compared with recidivism three times as steep for inmates who had no
treatment. A report released by the National Institute of Justice, a
research arm of the U.S. Department of Justice, looked at programs in
California, New York, Delaware and Oregon and found recidivism reduced up
to 60 percent by drug treatment programs.

For the 17,000 inmates in Florida's prisons participating in drug treatment
programs as of last year, studies don't make a difference, but impending
program cuts will. "When we get done crunching the numbers," Howard
Finkelstein told the Miami Herald, "the bottom lines will be that human
lives will be lost or go unrepaired, and misery will be spread from
generation to generation." Finkelstein is Broward County's chief public
defender and a former drug addict.

The war on drugs hasn't all been absurdity and futility. A few battles were
won along the way. Florida pioneered drug courts, which give judges
alternatives at sentencing. First-time drug offenders can enter a strict
rehab program, clean themselves and their record and never see a jail cell
- -- unless they get stoned again. Then it's prison. Treatment programs in
prison were another battle won, but now verging on defeat again.

That, in the end, is the meaning of the Department of Correction's $13
million "saving" in drug-treatment costs: A return to futility.