Arizona Finds Cost Savings in Treating Drug Offenders

Arizona, the first state to begin treating all its nonviolent drug
offenders rather than locking them up, says its new policy of diverting
addicts from prison into treatment has already saved the taxpayers money.

A report issued Tuesday by the Arizona Supreme Court estimated that
the state's new program saved more than $2.5 million in its first
fiscal year of operation, which ended in June 1998, and looks likely
to reap greater savings in the future. The report determined the
savings by calculating the difference in cost between locking up a
prisoner and putting the prisoner on probation and in treatment.

The results come as the nation's prisons and jails overflow with 1.8
million inmates, 400,000 of whom are addicted to drugs. The director
of national drug policy, Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey, has said he wants to
reduce the prison population by 250,000 through promoting options for
treatment.

From California to Connecticut, many states now spend more on prisons
than on higher education, making the Arizona model a conspicuous
alternative to building more prisons for offenders who committed
drug-related crimes to support their habits. At the end of 1998, New
York had 22,386 drug felons in its state prisons at an annual cost of
more than $700 million, according to the Correctional Association of
New York, a nonprofit group that monitors prison sentencing in New
York.

Of 2,622 people on probation diverted into treatment in Arizona, the
report said said, 77.5 percent have subsequently tested free of drugs,
a rate that is a significantly higher than for offenders on probation
in most other states. And 77.1 percent of Arizona drug users on
probation, who are expected to help pay for their treatment, made at
least one payment. Arizona has 25,000 people behind bars, a majority
of whom have drug problems.

Unlike the drug courts springing up around the country, which offer
offenders treatment as an alternative to trial and a criminal record,
Arizona sentences drug offenders to treatment once they have been
convicted or plead guilty and tailors the regimen to the particular
drug dependency.

Arizona finances the treatment through a luxury tax on alcohol sold in
the state, with half of the revenue going to a parents' commission to
run drug prevention and treatment programs. The $3.1 million in
alcohol tax revenue used to treat offenders is in addition to $3.2
million a year previously earmarked by the Legislature, said Barbara
Broderick, the state director of adult probation.

"Treatment works when it's done right," Ms. Broderick said in a
telephone interview from Phoenix. "Early and meaningful intervention
probably has the best payback in making sure we are safe" from new
crimes by addicts, she said. "When I put treatment with probation, it
changes the odds."

But Ms. Broderick added: "When we can't get someone to change, we send
them to prison. You can't continue to waste resources."

The report, which Ms. Broderick edited, said diverting drug offenders
into treatment saved Arizona $5,053,014 in prison costs in the 1998
fiscal year. Deducting probation costs and other expenses incurred by
the program, the Drug Treatment and Education Fund, the net saving was
$2,563,062. The report anticipated that the savings would increase in
the current fiscal year as more offenders were channeled into
treatment or finished probation.

Judge Rudy Gerber of Arizona's Court of Appeals, called the state's
new public health approach a welcome improvement over "the
revolving-door experience of drug offenders."

"It was like a turnstile," said Judge Gerber, who has been hearing
cases of drug offenders in Arizona for 25 years. "Many of us came to
the conclusion that we were parading them through the courts and
prisons without solving the root problem."

Now, he said, an offender convicted of possession of a modest amount
of cocaine in Arizona gets probation with mandatory treatment. "The
same guy in the Federal system is going to get a mandatory five-year
sentence," Judge Gerber said.

The Arizona Supreme Court report said it costs $16.06 a day to subject
someone on probation to intensive supervision, including drug
treatment and counseling, compared with $50 a day to keep an inmate in
prison.

Norman Helber, the chief of adult probation for Maricopa County, which
has accounted for 56.6 percent of the arrests for drug sale or
possession in Arizona, said the new treatment approach "has been
fantastic from the field perspective." He said Maricopa County, which
includes Phoenix, handles 39,000 people on probation a year, many of
whom have substance abuse problems.

Helber attributed the change in public opinion to the mounting cost of
locking up drug offenders.

"I thought it was extremely wise of a broad base of taxpayers in an
extremely conservative state to say, we're not going to rely just on
prisons anymore," he said.

The treatment option was an element of Proposition 200, the Drug
Medicalization, Prevention and Control Act, which voters approved in
November 1998 by 65 percent to 35 percent. The Legislature balked at
enacting it, in part because the referendum also endorsed the use of
marijuana and other drugs for medicinal purposes as long as two
doctors prescribed it in writing. The proposition was presented again
last year to state voters, who approved it again, this time by 57
percent to 43 percent.

Charles A. Blanchard, a former Arizona state legislator who is now
chief counsel for the Office of National Drug Control Policy, said
that even before Arizona's program became law, offenders convicted of
possessing drugs in the state were rarely sent to prison and that some
offenders caught selling drugs plea-bargained their sentences down to
probation, as it happens in other states.

But the referendum made a sizable amount of money available for drug
treatment, Blanchard said. And mandating treatment, he said, "caused
decision makers to say now that prison isn't even an option, so what
do we do with the offenders? In the past, many of these people would
get lost in the probation system with nothing really done."