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Essay On Drug Incarceration

1151 Words5 Pages

Through the years everything on earth has gone through an evolving period where changes must be made to better correlate with their environments. In the criminal justice system one area in specific that needs to go through such a stage of evolution is the incarceration of drug related addictions and crimes. Over the years prison populations have sky rocketed due to the mass incarceration of drug related offenses. Over populated prisons are now a major issue in the United States and continues to be a highly debated issue across the nation. One way we can fix this problem is to rehabilitate the drug addict and show them the path to a clear and clean future. Serving prison sentences are not the correct way to help someone with an addiction …show more content…

prison policy (Samuels 1). Prisoners were encouraged to develop occupational skills and to resolve psychological problems, such as substance abuse or aggression, which might interfere with their reintegration into society. Indeed, many inmates received court sentences that mandated treatment for such problems. Since then, however, rehabilitation has taken a back seat to a "get tough on crime" approach that sees punishment as prison's main function (1). The approach has created explosive growth in the prison population, while having at most a modest effect on crime …show more content…

According to research that tracks individuals in treatment over extended periods, most people who get into and remain in treatment stop using drugs, decrease their criminal activity, and improve their occupational, social, and psychological functioning (1). For example, methadone treatment has been shown to increase participation in behavioral therapy and decrease both drug use and criminal behavior (1). However, individual treatment outcomes depend on the extent and nature of the patient’s problems, the appropriateness of treatment and related services used to address those problems, and the quality of interaction between the patient and his or her treatment providers

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Society most of time tends to be keen on helping each other. One way we help each other is by allowing inmates, no matter the crime, to join rehab. Steve Earle the author of ‘A Death in Texas’ was in drug rehab at one-point, finished rehab, and got clean of drugs. Earle then wrote about Jonathan Wayne Nobles a man on death row for killing two people. While Nobles was on death row he took drug rehab and got clean of his drug addiction.

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In 2014 there were 215,000 people incarcerated in federal prisons, almost half were there for drug-related offenses with the enactment of mandatory minimum sentencing laws for drug offenses in the 1980s, increasing the population by more than 800 percent (Malcolm, 2014.) “Moreover, drug offenders make up the single largest category of incarcerated offenders in Tennessee, serving an average sentence of 9.7 years” (Malcolm, 2014, paragraph 21.) By limit sentencing, we can address the issues of high cost, by using probation and parole for more misdemeanor

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Drug Addiction Imagine a life where someone is controlled by something that doesn't have a pulse, controlled by a substance that they can see ruining their life but for some reason they can't control the outcome. Substance abuse costs the health care system about $11 billion, with overall costs reaching $193 billion. That $11 Billion dollars could go to treating the addiction rather than treating the outcome, and instead of locking up low level drug offenders, we as a society should help them through their difficult time. And according to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), approximately 27 million Americans, or 10.2% of the American population over the age of 12 reported using illicit drugs in 2014. 10% of our society is

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With drug treatment, more probation, and community service, inmates will get the true chance to change for the better without having to face imprisonment. Cullen’s research says “... Sometimes, longer stays can even increase recidivism” (Cullen). Sometimes, serving a long sentence for a small crime makes the inmates worse off instead of better. This is why alternatives to incarceration are so important not only for the inmates, but it helps with overcrowding. Although the alternatives solve mass incarceration, it does not solve the agendas being pushed out that cause a lot of people to be arrested.

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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,

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Supervised probation face many challenges as the world of crime and caliber of criminals change constantly. Nevertheless, the variety and the volume of offenders makes it even more difficult to implement supervised probation (Siegel & Bartollas, 2014). In conjunction with the volume and variety of offenders, there is another contributing factor that creates a challenge called substance abuse. It is estimated that over half of all jails and a third of all prisons are due to offenders that have violated supervised probation and parole (Virlee, 2015). Common sense allows if you place someone on supervised probation for substance abuse, the chances are almost certain the individual will undergo some type of withdrawal as the detox plays its course.

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On April 20 of this year I attended the drug court which is located in the Erie County Courthouse. The Drug Court is intended to promote healthy and law-abiding behavior for its participants. It acts as an alternative for jail and an individual is free to live in the community as long he or she participates in all services, along with being subject to random drug testing.

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Drug offenders often spend most of their life in prison, and once they are released, they have no knowledge or skills pertaining to the real world.

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One major solution to this problem is simply the accountability that the offenders are held to. These addicts are too often just sentenced to be incarcerated for years on end, or to drug programs with no real sense of urgency. Drug addicts do not belong in prison, that sentence only leads to further problems such as prison overcrowding or prison violence as a whole. Drug addicts do need to be held accountable though, with the sentence to a mandatory drug treatment facility. Too many times drug offenders are looked at with leniency on behalf of the judge and are sentenced to a termed probation as well as to completion of a drug program.

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The Drug Treatment Alternative-to-Prison Program is another attempt to provide better treatment for people who are convicted. The study showed that drug offenders who underwent a treatment program outside of prison had a 26 percent less rate of re-arrest after two years than a control group that was sent to prison (Justice Policy Institute, 2010). Rehabilitative programs like the Second Chance Act and the Drug Treatment Alternative-to-Prison Program has shown to growth and positive

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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

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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).

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They are less likely to return if low level drug offenders receive treatment during and after prison. Olson and Lurigion state ,"Drug addiction is a chronic relapse brain disease with biological, psychological, social and behavioral concomitants"(600). If a drug criminal is treated for his addiction, he/she will be less likely to commit crimes. The treatment has to be comprehensive and provide a wide range of treatment (Olsen and Lurigion (601) Many professions believe treatment is more effective than incarceration for several months.

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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.

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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

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