Substance Use, Incarceration and Race We need to have additional substance use treatment options instead of sending drug addicts straight to prison. Treatment costs tend to be far less than incarceration. There are higher rates of substance use within whites, but higher rates of African Americans being incarcerated for drugs. These factors have been proven to increase the rates of incarceration and substance use. The recidivism rate is also higher among inmates with substance use issues. Treatment helps prepare addicts to return to society and a chance to choose something different. Offering addicts treatment rather than incarceration, will allow them to have a better chance at their future. In 2009 African Americans were incarcerated at a 6.7% higher than whites and 2.6% higher in the US than Hispanics. Part of the reason being there is additional crimes in lower income neighborhoods, there are less people …show more content…
For example, in 2012 the US spent $81 billion on corrections alone. That has increased at triple the rate the US spends on education. If we offered treatment instead the cost would decrease by millions. The recidivism rate would decrease and save money that way also. There would be higher employment rates because they wouldn’t have had went to prison and have felonies on their record. Housing becomes a struggle if you have a criminal record, landlord will tend to not rent to you. Landlords are often charged less fees to not rent to people with a criminal record. This will force addicts to return to communities that have higher drug and crime rates. It’s almost impossible for addicts to stay sober and away from a life of crime when forced back into that environment. It seems that we set addicts up for failure when we give them treatment and turn around and send them back into the situation that got them to begin
Nevertheless, millions of African Americans still live mired in poverty, susceptible to poor living conditions in underserved inner cities. The War on Drugs, which began in the 1980s, is a leading cause of the high rate of incarceration among African Americans, especially males. Today, criminal gangs have spread throughout the country and into the prisons. The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world, with over 1.6 million dwelling in prisons. Of this number, a fairly large amount are African Americans.
Incarceration rates in the United States are extremely higher than other countries. According to Schlesinger in her article “The Failure of Race Neutral Policies: How Mandatory Terms and Sentencing Enhancements Contribute to Mass Racialized Incarceration” there are, “Currently, one and a half million people are incarcerated in either state or federal prisons” (Schlesinger). This number is very high compared to other countries. A large majority of the people incarcerated are African Americans.
The people incarcerated for drug abuse are mainly Black or other minorities. The system can not be color blind when a specific group is incarcerated at higher rates than another. According to “ The Drug War as Race War,” Kenneth B. Nunn shares a fact from the Mental Health department saying that “ 76% are White drug users, 14% are Black, and 8% are Hispanic” ( Nunn). The incarceration rates should be higher for Whites given the fact that they have a higher drug usage reported. In all reality, it would not make sense to lock up any group at a significantly greater rate compared
Since, the majority of African-Americans live in areas of drug involvement, they are more likely to be racially profiled and investigated. This has created an uneven ethnic ratio in prisons and produced stereotypes that affect children that prevent them from becoming abiding citizens.
Why we should incarcerate drug users Currently one of the less heated but still talked about debates is the issue of what we should do with those who have been caught using illegal substances. Some people say that we should be giving them rehab, and some say that they deserve to be in their. Both sides have their points, but the evidence points towards incarceration being a better option. The reason our judicial system incarcerates drug abusers are because enforcement will discourage drug use, it will keep them away from innocent people, and it will punish the addicts so they know not to do it again.
Rehabilitation is paramount in order to form a brighter, healthier future. After all, what good to society is a brilliant mind, if a highly disorientating substance continually afflicts it? Most of the time these same people that abuse drugs are the ones being directly affected by some type of outside oppression. Our jails and prisons serve as a type of rehab as well. Once in jail or prison, abusers have no access to illegal drugs and are forced to quit cold turkey from all illegal substances, including nicotine.
In context to, Tonry, (2014), especially in California, this was for the reason that unlawful behaviors became a chief economical net to the masses. Various changes passed by the governing authority encompassed of sentencing laws which made numeral of African Americans to be imprisoned when alleged to have engaged in crime. The end result of this was the prison population increasing and thus more prisons were put in place. Individuals living in the southern states were most affected as they were imprisoned based on their races, status in the society and education level, minority groups were the most suspected criminals since their level of drug addiction was high hence making them to be the most disadvantaged.
The prison population is overwhelmingly male and disproportionately minority. The Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that 25% of state prisoners are white, 38% are black and 21% are Hispanic, revealing a degree of disproportion when compared to the general population where 62% are white, 13% are black and 17% are Hispanic. Racial disparity with regards to imprisonment has been a feature of the prison system from decades yet this disparity has increased over time. African Americans today are incarcerated in state prisons at a rate that is 5.1 times the imprisonment of whites. African Americans comprise 31% of individuals arrested for drug violations.
1. Title of Research Topic - Juvenile substance abuse: A comparison of effectiveness and recidivism rates among offenders within drug-court programs and those sentenced to traditional sentencing. 2. Introduction of Topic – The late 20th century witnessed an alarming increase in substance abuse in the United States, and today, it still continues to rage on, coupled with a continuously expanding inmate population. Therefore, in order to battle this disastrous obstacle, the first ever drug court was established in Miami-Dade County, Florida in 1989.
In 1989, officials in Miami-Dade County, Florida established the nation’s first drug court. This special court was designed to bring drug treatment more fully into the criminal justice system, treating offenders with a history of drug abuse for their addiction, while simultaneously ensuring supervision, and sanctions when needed, from the courts. The movement for an alternative court to sentence drug offenders emerged from the rapidly evolving reality that the nation’s decision to address drug abuse through law enforcement mechanisms would continue to pose significant challenges for the criminal court system. In 2004, 53% of persons in state prison were identified with a drug dependence or abuse problem, but only 15% were receiving professional
Similarly, Brown found that in a matched cohort study comparing traditional prison sentencing to drug court programs it was shown that there was significantly less recidivism in the drug court participants than in the offenders that were sentenced to jail or prison time. In this study 137 drug court participants were matched with offenders that had been sentenced traditionally. It was shown that the recidivism rate for drug court participants was only thirty percent, whereas the traditionally sentenced participants had a forty-seven percent recidivism rate. Brown also examined the time between program completion and participants committing a new crime. In the drug court participants, the mean time was 614 days, and in the traditionally sentenced participants the average time was 463 days (Brown,
Determining this, the Federal Bureau of Prisons has also developed a comprehensive drug abuse treatment strategy for those incarcerated inmates who were affected by illegal drug activities. Drug education programs, and comprehensive drug abuse counseling is offered to nearly all incarcerated inmates. While the number directly related illegal drug activity to inmate incarceration may be approximately fifty-one percent, some form of illegal drug activity may eventually affect nearly all
In the 1970s the United States entered the era known as mass incarceration, the byproduct of the drug war. The War on Drugs changed how society handled drug dependency, diverting the problem from public health to criminal justice. Since the Nixon administration, the political stance on being tough on crime has resulted in various laws and policing practices that heavily criminalized drugs to point in which the prison population in the United States increased from 300,000 people in 1972 to 2.3 million today (Barish, DuVernay, Averick & DuVernay, 2016). The epidemic of mass incarceration corresponds to a variety of public health issues such as mental illness, increased violence within society, increased incidence of addictions, and increased incidence of chronic illnesses (Drucker, 2013).
The current system that incarcerates people over and over is unsustainable and does not lower the crime rate nor encourage prisoner reformation. When non-violent, first time offenders are incarcerated alongside violent repeat offenders, their chance of recidivating can be drastically altered by their experience in prison. Alternative sentencing for non-violent drug offenders could alleviate this problem, but many current laws hinder many possible solutions. Recently lawmakers have made attempts to lower the recidivism rates in America, for example the Second Chance Act helps aid prisoners returning into society after incarceration. The act allows states to appropriate money to communities to help provide services such as education, drug treatment programs, mental health programs, job corps services, and others to aid in offenders returning to society after incarceration (Conyers, 2013).
This leads to the question of whether the justice system is doing an adequate job of dealing with drug addiction. Instead of incarcerating people for drug abuse, an alternative is treating victims by rehab and treatment. This paper will exam why treatment is the superior option for