TOP U.S. DRUG OFFICIAL PROPOSES SHIFT IN CRIMINAL JUSTICE POLICY

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 White House's 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 concludes on 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 to 85 percent of the 1.8 million inmates in
American prisons and jails were there fundamentally 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 not only to Congress, but also to state and local politicians
and law-enforcement officials, who tend toward greater skepticism
about the value of treatment for criminals.

The country's penal system, McCaffrey said, costs taxpayers $38
billion a year, and left unchecked, the prison population will soon
reach two 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, the country's top criminal justice official, 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.