DRUG CZAR PROPOSES TREATMENT FOR CRIMINALS

Cycle Between Substance Abuse, Crime Cited

WASHINGTON -- The Clinton administration's top official on drug policy has
proposed a strategy of integrating drug testing and treatment into virtually
every phase of the criminal justice process, from arrests to incarceration
and after release from prison.

The director of national drug policy, Gen. Barry McCaffrey, long a proponent
of treatment, laid out a detailed case for his strategy on Tuesday and
Wednesday to 900 law-enforcement, prison and public-health specialists who
converged from around the country to discuss how to break the intractable
cycle between substance abuse and crime.

McCaffrey told them that the present criminal justice system was a
"disaster" that has put tens of thousands of drug offenders behind bars
without treating the addictions that had put them there. The three-day
assembly, which concluded Thursday, was called by the White House Office of
National Drug Control, the Department of Justice and the Department of
Health and Human Services to mobilize support for their belief that drug
treatment works, even when it is forced upon prisoners in custody.

"Take back what you've learned from this conference," Attorney General Janet
Reno told the delegates Wednesday. "Know you're on the right track."

Refining an argument that he has been advancing for months, McCaffrey said
that an estimated 50 percent to 85 percent of the 1.8 million inmates in
U.S. prisons and jails were there because of compulsive use of psychoactive
drugs or alcohol.

McCaffrey began promoting the need for treatment shortly after he took the
White House post in 1996. Drug treatment programs are now in 26 of the 42
federal prisons, with others expected to join later.

A study prepared by the White House drug control office estimated that drug
treatment in prison would add another $3,000 to the $20,000 or more a year
spent to incarcerate an inmate, but that money would be saved in the long
run because treatment would reduce the number of people returning to prison.

"It's going to cost a lot less than we're spending," said McCaffrey, who
declined to put a price tag on what the new emphasis on treatment would
cost. To get the money, the administration must sell its strategy to
Congress, state and local politicians and law-enforcement officials.

The country's penal system, McCaffrey said, costs taxpayers $38 billion a
year and, left unchecked, the prison population will soon reach 2 million.

The new strategy attempts to reconcile two contradictory views of drugs and
crime. The criminal justice approach has focused on catching and punishing
offenders; the public health approach has argued for treating the addiction
that led the offenders to commit crimes.

"We really haven't been adversaries but we haven't been allies either," said
Donna Shalala, secretary of Health and Human Services, whose department
takes a public health approach to drug addiction.

But Reno has thrown her support behind the new strategy espoused by
McCaffrey. Wednesday, she said that courts could make a tremendous
difference if their caseloads of drug offenders were reduced to manageable
numbers.

"We can make courts a beacon of hope rather than a dropping-off place after
everything else has failed," she said.