DRUG TREATMENT-LESS HELP IN PRISON WILL BOOMERANG

President Clinton proposes setting aside $215 million in his fiscal year
2000 budget for addressing drug abuse among prisoners, parolees and
probationers. He's on the right track. Making a serious effort to break the
drug habits of convicts and ex-convicts is an idea whose time has come.

Crime and drugs routinely work in tandem to undermine society. Many
prisoners report having committed crimes to buy drugs, or while high on
drugs. More have long police records. Though punishment is definitely in
order, experts are increasingly finding that punishment by itself is
counterproductive. The courts, prisons, prosecutors, probation officers and
police must do everything possible to ensure testing and treatment as well.

Drug experts used to believe that only those users who wanted treatment
would benefit from it. But too many prisoners and ex-cons have gained from
mandatory treatment for that argument to be considered valid any longer.
Indeed, the old argument may have served as a wrongheaded excuse to avoid
increased funding.

Leaving things on automatic pilot will only make things worse. According to
the Bureau of Justice Statistics - a branch of the Justice Department - the
proportion of inmates in state prisons who used drugs in the month prior to
their arrest grew from 50 percent in 1990 to 57 percent in 1997.
Eighty-three percent of state prison inmates and 73 percent of those in
federal correctional facilities acknowledge having used drugs at some point.

Simultaneously, the proportion of state prison inmates who were in drug
treatment programs plunged to less than 10 percent in 1997 from nearly 25
percent in 1991. In the federal prison system, treatment declined from 15.7
percent to just over 9 percent. A 100 percent increase in the number of
prisoners since 1980 - now 1.8 million - is projected to climb much higher.
Getting a captive audience to see the light now is critical.

But as more beds have been set aside to accommodate more prisoners, less
space has been left for counseling and educational programs. Instead of the
justifiable trade-off lawmakers thought they were making, locking people up
with far less testing and treatment has boomeranged.

As Mr. Clinton recently observed, we need to seize the opportunity to
"harness all the resources of our criminal justice system." Otherwise, the
folly will continue as prisoners finish serving their time, only to hit the
streets for more drugs and crime.