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A Series by William Buchheit
Forty years after Richard Nixon declared it, America’s war on drugs remains an unmitigated failure. Substance abuse in the US remains high, as does the availability of drugs in every city in every state. And even if the use of long-standing illicit drugs may have dropped by the smallest of margins, booms in prescription drug abuse and methamphetamine production have reached unprecedented levels. All the while, America’s legal drugs - alcohol and tobacco - kill 25 times more people each year than all illegal drugs combined. This series will examine our failed drug policies at both the local and national levels, and offer a few ways in which they may be corrected.
“There’s got to be a better balance”
According to a 2008 FBI report, South Carolina is America’s most violent state. Our violent crime rate (788.3 incidents per 10,000 residents) is 69% higher than the national average (466.9). Interestingly, we have the eighth-highest incarceration rate in the country. So if we are locking up so many people, why do our crime levels remain sky high? Obviously, our correctional system is flawed. The Pew Center for the States, a national research center working to advance state policies that serve the public interest, concluded as much in a report released last month.
“Violent and career criminals need to be locked up, and for a long time,” said Adam Gelb, director of the center’s performance safety project. “But our research shows that prisons are housing too many people who can be managed safely and held accountable in the community at far lower cost.”
In the last 15 years, five new prisons (4 Level-2s and 1 Level-3) have opened in SC, and the state’s prison population has surged from 27,364 to 38,227. The fact that we still lead the nation in violent crime proves, as the Pew Center put it, “we cannot build our way to public safety.”
David Forrester has served as Director of the Spartanburg Alcohol and Drug Abuse Commission (SADAC) for 35 years. When asked if the drug war is winnable, he is quick to answer.
“It hasn’t been since Nixon declared it, because we’re spending 90% of the money in the war on drugs on enforcement and not treatment,” he says.
SADAC Deputy Director Chris Pollard, who has worked with Spartanburg law enforcement since 1996, agrees with Forrester.
“I think we put the vast, overwhelming majority into law enforcement and incarceration,” he explains. “And we don’t do anything to address recidivism. There’s got to be a better balance there.”
As it stands, the financial imbalance is staggering. State taxpayers put up around $80 each day to house an average inmate, while spending $3.42 daily on each former inmate on probation or parole. The grim results of that discrepancy are overwhelmed parole and probation officers, zero emphasis on substance abuse treatment and no programs to help integrate prisoners back into society upon their release. It is hardly shocking that two-thirds of all former inmates are back behind bars within three years. Our justice system throws them out in the streets with nowhere to live and a criminal record that makes finding a job all but impossible.
“There’s no diversion or treatment involved. It’s just that ‘lock them up and forget them’ mentality,” explains Forrester. And what you do is you take somebody who may not be a hardcore criminal but has an alcohol or drug problem and they wind up in the graduate school for criminal thinking. So, what we’ve done is set them up to fail for the rest of their lives.”
“Flawed logic”
Indeed, life behind bars does little to encourage young men and women to get clean. It does, however, encourage them to get tough and get clever, and they often come out more violent and dangerous than they go in.
“For a non-violent individual who’s not a threat to public safety, what you’re saying is: ‘We’re going to require you to spend a certain amount of time around a bunch of criminals who will teach you to do the bad things you’re doing even better.’ There is some flawed logic I think in that,” Pollard asserts.
Indeed, with harsh federal sentencing guidelines known as “mandatory minimums,” non-violent addicts and dealers often spend more time in prison than rapists, wife-beaters and burglars. And while frequent, well-publicized drug busts may reduce the supply of illegal drugs for a couple of days, Prohibition taught us that, as long as the demand is there, supply will rise to meet it. If the cops bust one house, addicts will flock to another street, house and dealer like birds to another bird feeder. The mentality that busting dealers and seizing their narcotics will help win the war on drugs is akin to believing you can bring an end to alcoholism by closing down an ABC store.
“We’ve got to start investing resources in reducing the demand for these things,” says Pollard. “Obviously, the less people that you have seeking the drugs, the better your chances of winning a war.”
Indeed, as long as the drugs are still coming into the US, it doesn’t matter who is selling them. And, for whatever reason, our nation rarely detains, prosecutes or does anything else to stifle druglords bringing them into our country.
“It’s easy to fill the jails up with low-level dealers and users but you don’t see the jails filling up with higher-end dealers and users and the money-people who are backing them,” explains Forrester. “You don’t see much in the papers about drug kingpins going to jail. It’s been three . . . four . . . five years since I’ve seen any big articles about that.”
Many agree that locking up non-violent drug offenders is counterproductive. Not only do kingpins keep narcotics coming across our borders, but jails and prisons have become completely overpopulated. A dreary economic climate and shrinking state budget has put an end to our state’s expansion of its correctional facilities. Thus, for every new prisoner that is booked, another must be released. And if we are letting out violent felons to make room for non-violent drug addicts, we are only further endangering our communities.
While daily arrests and small-time drug busts assert that we are still fighting a war on drugs, the cold hard stats reveal that war remains a losing battle. People are using and abusing narcotics as much as they ever have despite the fact that US taxpayers give $50 billion each year to the drug war.
Forrester and Pollard believe it is high time for a new strategy in this never-ending battle. Next time, we will look at some of the new ideas they feel would help improve things for both the addict and the taxpayer.
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