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Drug offenders have among the highest recidivism rates of all prisoners. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 76.9% of drug offenders get arrested for a new crime within five years of their release.
Although jails typically don’t offer drug treatment, many state prisons do—but the above data is for state prisons. So what’s going wrong? Why isn’t prison drug treatment working?
There’s no easy answer to that question. However, a prison drug counselor, a drug policy expert, and two former inmates did their best to answer it by offering to identify what they see as some of the current problems with prison drug treatment:
1. Treatment is not offered soon enough.
Many county jails don’t offer any treatment, so inmates typically have to wait until they get to state prison until they get treatment. For some inmates, though, it’s a much longer wait than that.
Will, a former New York State prisoner who asked only to be identified by his first name, alludes to the fact that inmates with shorter sentences necessarily get priority when it comes to placement in the state’s 90-day drug treatment program. As a result, those with longer terms typically have to wait—sometimes for years—before there’s room.
2. After treatment, prisoners are returned to general population.
This can be a problem because it means that people who have begun taking steps toward recovery are regularly mixing with people who may still be more interested in living a criminal lifestyle.
That’s one of the problems that Frank, a prison drug counselor who asked to have his name changed to avoid losing his job, sees in New York facilities. “I have someone on my unit that has five years left—why send them back to general population? When you put them back in GP, anything that you’ve gained you lose because you’re with people who know nothing about treatment,” he said.
Seth Ferranti, who served more than two decades in federal prison, concurred. While behind bars, Ferranti completed a 10-month Residential Drug Abuse Program (RDAP). He said, “RDAP worked like this: you finished the program, graduated, and went to [a] halfway house, so you took the program at the door. That is how it should work because it is counterproductive to put someone who just went through the program back in a harmful environment that can lead to relapse.”
3. The staff aren’t necessarily helpful.
Both Ferranti and Frank said that a lot of the staff just don’t care or are overworked – and that can make meaningful treatment difficult. “Everyone is just trying to do their job and go home and if you are seriously trying to recover you need a good support network in prison and out,” Ferranti said. “The idea and theories are good but the practice isn’t.”
One of the problems that Frank sees in New York is that it’s really difficult to fire incompetent or under-performing counselors. They’re state jobs.
4. Not everyone wants to get help.
This is perhaps to be expected in a prison treatment environment—and it’s something that is true in a lot of court-mandated treatment environments—but it’s definitely a problem.
“I got a good experience out of the program because I wanted to come back to society,” said Ferranti. “I wanted to be prepared but prison is a hard place to carry that type of attitude. I had been in a long time and prisoners respected me so I could carry it how I wanted but someone fresh into prison and trying to change is going to have a hard time with all the peer pressure and politics.”
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Category(s):Addictions, Drug Addiction
Source material from The Fix
