CRACK CRIME, SOMEHOW

Drugs lead to crime. The priority, surely, should be treating
addiction. Incarceration is not the way to do it By Decca Aitkenhead

As boasts go, it is probably not the most sensational of triumphs. A
couple of years ago, one in every four prisoners was testing
positively for drugs, and now - wait for it - the figure has fallen to
one in five!

This is the number one boast of the newly published annual prison
service report, and it is obviously a piece of good news. It hardly
amounts to a declaration of victory in the war on drugs in jail,
however, and sure enough, the war continues to be waged, or at least
talked about, by the prison service - most recently in a special
Commons inquiry. A committee has spent the past few weeks hearing
evidence, and among the contributions heard has been the Chief
Inspector of Prisons' opinion that at least 10 drug barons operate in
every jail, and that mandatory drug testing of prisoners is ‘useless'.

Drugs in prison are clearly a serious, ongoing problem. That said,
besides the modest fall in positive drug tests, the prison service
does now have more good news, for it has a coherent strategy in place
for more focused drug testing, and for treatment programmes
co-ordinated with outside agencies. The unfortunately-named drug-free
wings are being expanded, tighter security is letting fewer drugs in;
nearly pounds 80m has been made available to implement all of this.
These are positive steps, and in time they should deliver some more
modest boasts.

The problem with the whole strategy of fighting drugs in prison,
however, is that the fight takes place in that most inauspicious of
environments: prison. Once an addict becomes an inmate, he has lost
his most precious thing, namely liberty, and the law has used up its
ultimate sanction - the removal of liberty. The single greatest
motivation the law could offer an offender to stop taking drugs is
therefore already gone before it has had a chance to work. So it is
hardly surprising that a prison sentence can't stop a junkie from
continuing to support the addiction which will send him straight back
to burgling houses once he's out - but it should make us seriously ask
what good it did to send him inside at all.

Most hard drug-using prisoners are inside because their addiction
drove them to commit crime. Addicts steal an estimated pounds 2.5bn
worth of property each year, and about a third of all property crime
is driven by drugs; recent research found that two thirds of arrested
suspects tested positive for illegal drugs, and in a Manchester study,
the figure was 78% and a third had taken heroin. A health department
survey of 1,100 addicts suggested they had committed 70,000 crimes in
the three months before entering treatment. The logic of these
statistics is fairly self-evident: if we could devise a strategy that
stopped them taking drugs, these offenders would cease to be
offenders, and they would not need to be inside at all.

There is a tendency to assume that drug-users are somehow immune from
all normal laws of human behaviour, but this is not the case. Mark
Kleiman, an American expert on drugs in prison, makes the case that:
‘Of course drug addiction is a disease - but alcoholism, for example,
is not a disease of the elbow, it's a disease of the volition. Taking
drugs is not an involuntary action, like an epileptic fit.'

In the light of this, our current strategy of locking up offending
addicts, and randomly testing them for drugs inside, does not look
like much of a solution. Only 5% of inmates are tested each month, so
a prisoner can expect to go untested for up to 20 months. People break
rules if they think that they will get away with it, and this is as
true of a crack-addict mugger as it is of you or I when we park on
double yellow lines; broadly speaking, prisoners have a bolder
attitude than most to risk, or they wouldn't have gambled on crimes
that ended up putting them inside. But they still calculate risk like
everyone else - and taking drugs in prison is plainly not much of a
gamble. The trouble is, if we increase the risk by testing everyone
all the time, we waste even more money testing those prisoners who
have never taken a drug in their life.

A much more effective strategy would be to apply the logic of risk to
criminal drug addicts. Instead of sending them to prison, we could
sentence them to twice weekly drug tests; a positive test would be
punished by custody, thus the law retains the power of its greatest
threat. Drugs are powerful, but not irresistible, and addicts need
reasons to quit; a US study of wealthy cocaine addicts found that if
you rewarded them with sports vouchers worth a meaninglessly small sum
of dollars for negative tests, they were strikingly more successful
than those offered nothing.

Testing needs to function alongside treatment. The problems with
treatment programmes inside prison are well-documented and
unsurprising, for prison is the opposite of a therapeutic environment,
and custodial treatment programmes are seldom more than a side-show
within the institutions. As part of a non-custodial sentence, however,
compulsory treatment is not a side-show but the whole point of the
sentence, and so stands a better chance of success.

Compulsory treatment is still a new and fairly problematic idea, for
we tend to assume that only voluntary counselling can work. How many
drug counsellors does it take to change a lightbulb? Only one, goes
the joke, but the lightbulb has to really want to change. This seems
like an obvious truth, and yet there is in fact no evidence to support
it. Mark Kleiman makes the ancilliary point that purely voluntary
treatment is anyway a fallacy, for an addict who elects to be treated
is always motivated by the fear of losing something - friends,
partner, job, home, or something else. Therefore, to impose the fear
of losing liberty would not be qualitatively different. ‘It's not
clear from any of the evidence,' he says, ‘that it much matters why
the addict is there on the treatment programme.'

The interesting fact is that the government has already acknowledged
this, and last year it introduced drug treatment and testing orders as
an alternative to custodial sentences. Judges have been given the
option to impose testing and treatment on an offender whose drug use
is identified as the core problem - but this applies in only three
pilot areas, and in the first 11 months only 80 such sentences have
been passed. ‘The thing is,' a home office spokesman explained, ‘if
it's to work, there's got to be a positive commitment from the
offender's side. He's got to really want to be part of the programme.
It couldn't work if he was a really high drug user.'

It is inevitable that some offenders would rather go to prison where
they can take drugs than stay outside under conditions where they
cannot. But large numbers wouldn't - and they should have the
opportunity to find out whether, with sufficient incentive, they could
stop taking drugs. Rather than assume the worst - and let offenders
assume the worst - we should be starting from the opposite end, and
stop locking anyone up until they have proved their inability to quit
drugs.

The battle against drugs in prison won't begin to work until drug
treatment and testing orders are extended, and receive the kind of
resources we are currently wasting on locking people up. The easiest
way to keep drugs out of prison is, rather obviously, to keep drug
addicts out.