SEEING CRIMINAL ADDICTS THROUGH MIDDLE-CLASS EYES

Some baby-boomers remember smoking dope and going to rock concerts back in
college. Or they might have done a little cocaine once in awhile on a
Saturday night, then went out out drinking and had a wild time.

Was it really that bad? Some may still have a bag hidden in their closet,
and smoke a joint on weekends. They still hold a job, have a family. . . .
Is it a federal crime? It never seemed to hurt anybody.

When they read that nearly one-third of prison inmates are incarcerated for
drug crimes, they're incensed. Those poor people should be set free, they
say, and given some drug treatment. Why fill our prisons with people whose
only crime is doing drugs?

Such thinking embraces a faulty and dangerous assumption, one that lies
beneath the rationale for decriminalizing illegal drugs, including the
effort on the California ballot this fall called Proposition 36. Proponents
don't see the downside of decriminalization because they look at their own
middle-class lives and their own experience with drugs, and assume people
in prison are just like them.

They think the person in prison for drugs is someone, maybe much like
themselves, who was just walking down the street one day with a bag in his
pocket, got arrested and ended up in prison. That's simply not reality.
Casual drug use bears almost no resemblance to criminal drug addiction.

First of all, criminal addicts are severely addicted, not occasional users.

Ernest Jarman, a prison psychologist, is assistant director for substance
abuse programs for the California Department of Corrections. He works with
the people in prison on drug charges, the ones drug decriminalization
proponents believe should be set free.

"I've done research for the department for almost 10 years, and I don't
come in contact with the casual drug user or the weekend drug user," Jarman
said. "From my corrections experience, I don't know what that is . . . We
deal in severity here."

Claude Meitzenheimer, who runs a treatment program at the Corcoran state
prison, says the inmates he treats are society's heaviest drug abusers,
round-the-clock junkies and tweakers whose drug use is so all-consuming it
makes holding a job, being a parent or living a normal life utterly impossible.

Comparing the criminal addict to the casual user is like comparing the
hardcore homeless alcoholic passed out on the sidewalk to someone who has a
glass of wine with dinner. The middle-class casual drug experience might be
smoking a joint before a Bruce Springsteen concert, then going back to work
on Monday. The criminal addict drug experience is snorting crystal meth
every day for three weeks, smoking pot and drinking a gallon of cheap wine
each day to take the edge off, and in the meantime robbing a gas station,
driving while extremely intoxicated and beating up his girlfriend.
Eventually, the criminal addict gets arrested for one of these crimes, and
drugs are found on him. When he goes before the judge, he often cops a plea
down to the drug charge.

And that highlights another fact legalization proponents miss. Criminal
addicts lead criminal lives. These are not people who just commit drug
crimes; they also commit the majority of non-drug crimes.

While approximately one-third of state prison inmates are in for drug
crimes, research shows that about 80 percent of all inmates have substance
abuse problems. Addiction causes most crime, and that's all crime, not just
drug crime. For example, most murders are committed under the influence of
drugs or alcohol. The inmates locked up for violent crimes or property
crimes are no different from those in for drug crimes. They're the same
people with the same problems, they just happened to get caught for
different things. Many convicts in for drug crimes were arrested for other
crimes but then pleaded down to the drug crime.

"These are people with big histories of criminal behavior," Meitzenheimer said.

Middle-class drug dabblers can't even imagine the world that criminal
addicts inhabit. Most criminal addicts didn't grow up in anything
resembling a normal home.

Jarman: "Many people think that people in prison were raised in a
middle-class environment, perhaps like we were. That is not the norm when
you go to prison. You find prison is a generational phenomenon in some
families. It's not uncommon to find several family members in prison. It's
not uncommon to find a father and son team or a mother and daughter team in
prison, even on the same prison yard."

The criminal addict's life is so addled by addiction, both his own
addiction and that of his family, that he never learned anything but a
criminal lifestyle.

Jarman: "We might call somebody like that undersocialized: They never
reached a level of adult functionality where they could survive on their
own and where they could be productive. You have to teach these people
basic living skills. You don't rehabilitate them, you habilitate them.

"Again, we're not talking about middle-class populations. We could be
talking about a child who grew up in a crack house, who grew up with
parents who were criminals, selling drugs, and it simply became very normal
behavior for him."

A study by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia
University bears this out. Forty-two percent of drug users behind bars have
family members who have also been in prison. Nearly 70 percent had friends
who were also criminals. How many suburban baby-boomers can say the same?

The solution to the large numbers of drug addicts in prison is not to let
these people go back to their addictions and criminal lives. Criminal
addicts need extensive, long-term treatment to become happy, productive and
law-abiding. But they rarely seek treatment by themselves, and don't want
it when it's offered.

Almost everyone knows that denial is a symptom of addiction; prisons are
full of addicts who deny they have a problem. If we set them free first and
then offer treatment, most will refuse it. But by keeping our drug laws
strict, providing enough drug treatment in prison and for parolees and
probationers, we can coerce criminal addicts into finally getting the help
they need.

Jim Gogek is a San Diego Union-Tribune editorial writer. Ed Gogek is an
Arizona psychiatrist.