Drug Treatment for Imprisoned Addicts Backed

The director of the administration’s war on drugs called Monday for a “historic shift” toward mandating drug treatment for hundreds of thousands of criminals, saying that policies aimed at simply locking up state and federal offenders without curing their addictions have failed.

“This is not a soft-on-crime issue. It’s trying to get good corrections policy combined with good drug-treatment policy,” Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey, who heads the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, told reporters. “The current system is broken.”

McCaffrey will deliver that same basic message today to 900 prominent law-enforcement officials, health administrators and government policy analysts gathering in Washington for a major conference on the issue. Atty. Gen. Janet Reno and Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala also will participate in the conference.

Law enforcement officials in California and several other states have moved in the last decade to develop drug courts and other ways of offering treatment to drug-addicted criminals. But McCaffrey said that, with as many as 85% of the nation’s nearly 2 million prisoners thought to be chronic drug users, a new national direction is needed to break the cycle of addiction.

Although McCaffrey has long been a supporter of drug-treatment programs, his comments Monday marked what for him was an unusually strong indictment of the failure of current prison policies. A growing body of evidence, McCaffrey said, shows that the failure to adequately treat drug addiction inside many local, state and federal prisons is producing inmates who are likely to commit offenses when they are released back into society.

McCaffrey aide Joseph C. Peters said that many prosecutors and law-enforcement officials “finally realize that we will never arrest our way out of this problem.”

Several groups active in the drug policy debate said that, although they would welcome greater attention to treatment, they are skeptical that McCaffrey’s call for a new national direction would amount to much more than political rhetoric.

“The message in itself is a good one. Drug and substance abuse should be a matter for health policy, not criminal policy,” said Ted Bridges, an analyst with the Drug Policy Foundation, a liberal research group in Washington. “But McCaffrey has been saying things along these lines before and he’s been saying a lot more than he’s been doing.”

Federal officials said that they have stepped up their commitment to drug treatment in recent years, with funds jumping 26% in the last four years to more than $3 billion. Money requested for drug treatment rose only 5.5% in the recently approved federal budget, but that still outpaced increases for border interdiction, drug law enforcement and other anti-drug money.

Meanwhile, money aimed specifically at drug treatment in prisons has soared 85% in the last four years, rising to an estimated $175 million in the current budget, officials said.

McCaffrey said that the federal prison system, with more than 100,000 inmates, is already moving to expand its treatment programs, rather than simply building more prisons to house more criminals who bounce in and out of jail. But, he said, state and local jailers--who house the vast majority of prisoners nationwide--must take the lead.

He pointed to the success of a treatment program in Delaware, where he said convicts receiving drug treatment inside and out of prison were 57% less likely to be rearrested and 37% less likely to use drugs than the untreated population.