A Mass Incarceration Nation

A close look at the United States criminal justice system and current mechanisms for fighting drug abuse

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Rhea Graham reached out for the syringe on her trash-filled table. The electric bills were late again. She wrapped the rubber tight around her arm, her frail, bruised body withering away as she poked a thin layer of pale skin and injected the meth into her body. Rhea was 37 years old, blinded by addiction.

It wasn’t long before she found herself incarcerated for drug charges.

Rising Incarceration Rates

The U.S. is home to 5 percent of the world’s population but 25 percent of its prisoners. In 1972, the prison population was 300,000. Today, that number is a staggering 2.3 million. This leaves the U.S. in first-place standing for the highest total number of incarcerated individuals in the world.

In 2017, more than 1.6 million arrests were made for drug law violations. Eighty-five percent of those arrests were for possession only, according to the The Drug Policy Alliance, an organization that works to reduce the role of criminalization in drug policy. Forty percent of total arrests in 2017 were for a marijuana law violation. Since 1970, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, the jail and prison population has grown by 700 percent.

1970 has since been coined as the birth year of mass incarceration. Much of that can be traced back to the crackdown on drug abuse and America’s response to dealing with it. With over 1.2 million arrests each year for the use or possession of drugs, one person is arrested every 25 seconds in the U.S.

The War on Drugs

Experts at the Prison Policy Initiative point to the Nixon era and the start of the war on drugs for sparking the mass incarceration generation. In 1969, President Richard Nixon declared that drugs were America’s number one enemy. From this, the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act was formulated. The act grew to be the main legal impetus for drug regulation in the U.S.. Nixon went on to dramatically expand the existence and breadth of federal drug control agencies during his presidency.

President Ronald Reagan had his hands in the agenda as well, working as a catalyst for radical drug regulation when he took office in 1981. According to “The 13th,” a Netflix documentary that offers an intimate glance into the U.S. prison system, Reagan took the problem of economic inequality, hyper-segregation, and drug abuse, and criminalized it in the form of the war on drugs.

When peering in at President Nixon as well as President Reagan’s rationale for the war on drugs, a potential ulterior motive appears. According to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the drug war is mimicking the establishment of the plantation. There are now an equal number of black men in prison as there were enslaved in 1820; yet blacks are not committing more drug crimes in the U.S. than whites.

In the 2015 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, 17 million whites and 4 million blacks reported to have used an illicit drug within the past month. According to The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, blacks make up 12.5 percent of illicit drug users, yet 29 percent of those arrested for a drug-related offense and 33 percent of the incarcerated population in state facilities for drug charges.

Those who end up in prison are then forced into labor, working on extremely low wages under a loophole in the 13th amendment: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”

The Federal Bureau of Prisons currently has a program called Federal Prison Industries (UNICOR) which pays inmates under one dollar an hour for labor. In 2016, the program grossed $500 million in sales.

Glenn Martin, President and Founder of GEM Trainers, a social justice consultancy firm, prison reform advocate, and former inmate, explained how he was forced to work on low wages while incarcerated. Glenn said he earned 21 dollars every two weeks working 40 hours each week.

“Our criminal justice system has become an economic engine,” said Glenn.

Despite this, annual funding for the war on drugs continues to pour out of taxpayer pockets, with $51 billion pooled annually, according to the CATO Institute. In the past four decades, the U.S. has devoted over one trillion dollars to the war on drugs.

The system demands exponentially high levels of funding each year—but is it effective? Is locking up citizens and burdening them with drug charges that will follow them for the rest of their life proving to have a considerable impact on reducing drug use in America today?

A Rise in Drug Abuse

Although the federal government continues to enforce a decades-old nationwide plan to eradicate drug abuse, rates for drug use are steadily increasing. Drug overdoses have become the number one cause of injury-related death in the U.S., taking the lives of an average 44,000 people each year.

Around one million heroin users were reported in 2014, according to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health. This represented a three-fold increase from 2003. According to the U.N.’s 2016 World Drug Report, heroin use was the highest it had been in 20 years.   

Death by drug overdose has increased five-fold since 1999. According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, there were a total of 17,000 drug overdose deaths in 1999, compared to the 72,000 in 2017. The largest proportion of deaths in 2017 stemmed from synthetic opioid overdose. Some of those opioids are legally available for pain relief; including oxycodone (OxyContin), morphine, fentanyl, codeine, and the list goes on. The issue arises when doctors prescribe opioids for individuals with chronic pain, in lieu of using them to solely treat acute (short term) pain.  

According to the CDC, for every 100 Americans, there were 58 opioid prescriptions written in 2017. Over 17 percent of U.S. citizens had at least one opioid prescription filled.

Opioid misuse was responsible for 29,406 overdoses in 2017. If opioid abuse accounts for more overdoses than any other form of drug, this begs the question: Is the government feeding the drug crisis in America today, rather than using those billions of taxpayer dollars to help combat the problem?

The war on drugs promotes locking up offenders to sober them up and get them away from the drug scene; but is it actually bringing some closer to it? Terry Thornton, a spokeswoman for California’s Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation stated in Washington Times Article, “The prison wall is not a boundary anymore.”

According to the Marijuana Library, a site that analyzes cannabis law reform, a crack dealer on a 21 year sentence, Ralph Sowell said “I’ve been selling drugs ever since I came to prison, and I’ve never been caught.” Sowell says he makes around 3,500 to 4,000 dollars a week selling drugs. That’s quite a contrast to the 25 cents to 1 dollar an hour inmates can make working under UNICOR. The Washington Times article continues on, stating there were nearly 1,000 reports involving drugs in California prisons. From 2006 to 2008, a total of 44 inmates died from a drug overdose.

Although drug overdose accounts for a number of prison deaths, there is no national quantitative data that displays the true scale of the problem. In the Bureau of Justice Statistics Mortality in State Prisons data, drug overdose isn’t even accounted for.

Glenn grew up in a tough neighborhood in Brooklyn and was shocked to discover how easy it was for people to smuggle drugs into prison.

“I never saw more drugs in my life than I did in prison.” - Glenn Martin

Glenn was shocked that the government spends so much money on trying to keep drugs out of the U.S., yet they can’t even restrict them from the most secure facilities in the country. “How are we going to keep drugs out of communities if we can’t even keep drugs out of facilities that are staffed by thousands of corrections officers?”

Although the U.S. has yet to confront drug abuse in a way that effectively decreases use and overdose annually, some countries have succeeded by adopting a more liberal path to fight their drug crises.

Decriminalizing Drugs

Since 2001, Portugal passed a law to decriminalize all drugs entirely. Portugal was the first country in the world to take such a radical approach to stomp out drug abuse. If an individual is caught with their own personal supply, they may be given a warning, a small fine, or have to appear before a doctor, lawyer, and social worker to help treat a potential drug addiction. Contrary to the U.S. model for fighting drug abuse, there are no arrests involved.

According to the Foundation for Economic Education, since 2000, HIV infection has drastically fallen in Portugal—from 104 new cases per million to 4 cases per million in 2015. The Transform Drug Policy Foundation found that from 2001 to 2012, rates of continuation for drug use among adults decreased by 16 percent.

Drug induced deaths in Portugal decreased nearly 60 percent from 2001 to 2012. And since money could be saved from law enforcement, funding was then transferred over to improving treatment options for drug users. Before decriminalization, there were 6,040 people enrolled in treatment for methadone and buprenorphine, and after decriminalization 14,887 were enrolled, according to CATO Institute.

Canada has also changed some of their policies regarding drug use. On October 17th, they became the first large-scale industrialized country to decriminalize marijuana nationwide. The bill states authorization of the “possession, production, distribution, sale, importation and exportation of cannabis.”  According to the Canadian Department of Justice, adults 18 and older are legally allowed to possess up to 30 grams of marijuana.

Countries around the world are taking steps forward on loosening the grip of federal regulation of drugs. For the U.S., however, billions of dollars each year are dedicated to locking up non-violent drug offenders, only to cycle them back into the system a significant proportion of the time.

Soaring Recidivism Rates

The U.S. has established a method of punishment for drug abuse that has many former inmates finding themselves right back where they started. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, patterns from 2005 to 2010 revealed drug offenders as the second most likely group to reoffend after property offenders.

A total of 77 percent of drug offenders who were released in 2005 were rearrested within five years. Almost half of those arrests were within the first year. Like many addicts, Rhea also found herself in system for drug charges on more than one occasion.

Each time an inmate gets rearrested, more money is taken out of taxpayer pockets. The National Archives and Records Administration stated that the average annual cost to imprison an inmate in a Residential Reentry Center for fiscal year 2015 was $26,000.  In total, the price of prisons pull out $39 billion taxpayer dollars annually to feed the growth of mass incarceration.

A one trillion-dollar nationwide program to extinguish drug abuse continues to fork out billions of taxpayer dollars each year; Yet drug use has maintained a rapid rise since 1970, and recidivism rates have skyrocketed as inmates continue to receive less-than adequate services for rehabilitation.

Incarcerating addicts

America tends to enforce a collective mainstream perspective on drug addicts—they made the choice to abuse drugs and if they didn’t want to be in jail or prison, they shouldn’t have continued to use them.

But for many, it’s not that easy. According to the American Medical Association and the American Society of Addiction Medicine, addiction is defined as a disease. The Center of Addiction states that addiction stems from biological, environmental, and behavioral factors. About 50 percent of the probability someone will adopt an addiction has to do with genetics.

If this is the case, the addictive tendencies of an individual, more often than not, originates from something they cannot fully control on their own. It requires the attention of medical professionals. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) states that “Because our drug policies emphasize punitive rather than rehabilitative response to substance abuse and addiction, they fail to address the actual cause of illness, which only exacerbates the disease and results in relapse and recidivism.”

ACLU then goes on to highlight Cameron Douglas, a 33-year-old who fought drug abuse since his twenties. He was caught with drugs in prison, and instead of the federal judge acknowledging his addiction by getting him the help he needed, Douglas was sentenced an additional four and a half years; only to spend more time in prison where he found the drugs in the first place.

According to the U.S. National Library of Medicine National Institutes of Health, 80 to 85 percent of prisoners who have drug-related problems do not receive treatment while incarcerated. This means up to 85 percent of inmates like Douglas have no professional help to pull them out of the depths of addiction while incarcerated. The same goes for Rhea. She was never offered treatment in jail. Because of this, 77 percent of them will recidivate. And according to CRC Health, it costs ten times more to incarcerate an addict than to successfully treat them.

For most, a dark past can be traced back in an addict’s life. Many are born into unhealthy environments, having been exposed to drug abuse at a very young age. Rhea grew up in poverty by a single mother. She was sexually abused from a very young age by her older brother until she was 12 years old. Because of this, she left home at the age of 14'. With no real backbone to keep her from falling down the wrong path, she began using drugs.

America’s Rehabilitative Services

The U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration stated that in 2014, somewhere around 22.7 million Americans ages 12 and older needed professional treatment for a drug or alcohol addiction; Of those, only 2.5 million actually received it.

There are many reasons why people who are in need of treatment may fail to receive it. For inmates, it could simply be because they are not offered it.

According to the American Psychological Association, because of budget cuts and the general attitude toward corrections, the quality of today’s prisons are even more unpleasant than they were in the past; and inmates are much less likely to have access to rehabilitative services.

For U.S. citizens who are not incarcerated, their insurance may not cover it. There may also be loopholes that bar addicts from getting into rehab, such as having a criminal record, being a minor, or having a mental health issue.

For those who do get access to rehabilitation, they have about a 30 percent chance of succeeding. However, Joseph Califano, founder of the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse, and former secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, stated that “The therapeutic community claims a 30 percent success rate, but only count people who complete the program,” Califano said 70 to 80 percent of those who are in therapy drop out between the three to six month period, according to an article from the American Addiction Centers (AAC).

Treatment centers are labeling success as sobriety immediately after completing treatment, not months or years later. Because addiction is a chronic health issue rather than an acute, short-term measurement of success is not reliable. According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIH), “The chronic nature of the disease means that relapsing to drug abuse is not only possible, but also likely.” The NIH goes on to say a more fair evaluation is one that is continual and ongoing after treatment.

Much of the blame, according to the AAC, lies upon there being no national standard definition of rehab. Because of this, many treatment centers rely on deceptive forms of measuring success. The AAC says those include sobriety rates immediately after treatment, internal studies, client interviews, and completion of the program.

In an interview with Scientific American, Bankole Johnson, a professor of neuroscience at the University of Virginia School of Medicine said that a majority of rehab facilities in the U.S. use a 12-step model of treatment. “They tend not to be medication-based,” said Johnson.

Narconon, a drug rehabilitation center that has high success rates even years after patients complete treatment, stated the five reasons they believe most treatment facilities fail to get their patients clean for good: little or no individual treatment, addicts still being tempted to use drugs, not enough detox, using drugs to treat addiction, and no balanced address to the problem of addiction.

“People who die of overdoses, if you look at their history, they were most likely recently in rehab or jail.” Dave Malloy, administrative supervisor for an outpatient program in Philadelphia   

Where do we go from here?

As more and more U.S. citizens continue to be locked up for drug abuse, drug use rates steadily rise. And for those who are fortunate enough to get treatment, relapse is more common than not.

The criminal justice system continues to punish people for addiction, and the majority of America’s rehabilitation facilities are determining success in the short term. So how do we truly solve the drug crisis in America today?

We could start by crumbling the foundation of belief and the stigma surrounding addiction, so we can begin treating it as a physical and mental health issue rather than a crime. According to the United Nations Regional Information Centre, Secretary General Ban Ki-moon urged treatment for addicts. “Drug-dependent people should not be treated with discrimination; they should be treated by medical experts and counsellors,” he said.

“Drug addiction is a disease, not a crime.”

According to In Public Safety, an American Military University website that posts commentary and analysis on law enforcement issues, there are more effective ways to treat drug users than to incarcerate them. Kelli Callahan, a criminal justice faculty member at American Military University with 10 years of experience working in corrections including two years in the mental health treatment unit, says there should be a focus on rehabilitating non-violent drug users outside of prison so they can work and be surrounded by support groups instead of walls and barriers.

“By placing them back into communities, they’re forced to be self-sufficient so the cost of their housing, food, and healthcare isn’t falling on the taxpayers,” said Callahan. However, Callahan emphasized the program must have structure and supervision so the drug users are not prone to falling back into their previous lifestyle.

“I think if we really are serious about reducing our prison population and reintegrating people into society, we must first undo the harm of decades of criminalization and mass incarceration by taking a wholesale look at the laws and procedures we have put into place that evidence suggests, doesn’t work,: said Glenn

Another solution is greater access to rehabilitation services. By decriminalizing drug addiction, the funding that was used for incarcerating addicts could then be reallocated and used to ensure treatment facilities around the nation are up to par, as emulated through Portugal’s approach. The government could also start by determining a national standard care for addiction that takes into consideration the long-term commitment in order to prevent relapse.

The AAC encourages “research-based therapies, such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Motivational Interviewing, and Contingency Management, in addiction to medication” during treatment. Cognitive behavior education (CBL) is also crucial, according to The Freedom Model Retreats, a rehabilitation facility with over a 60 percent long-term success rate. The facility believes CBL is important because it educates the patient. CBL helps the addict to comprehend how they can begin to change their habits and behaviors in order to heal.

In the State of Delaware, the Division of Substance Abuse and Mental Health provided treatment facilities incentives for taking urine tests, as well as keeping an eye on the patient’s home, work, and school life after treatment. In 2001, according to the AAC, Delaware was at 50 percent capacity, and 53 percent of the patients were coming to the treatment meetings regularly. In 2006, after following the Division of Substance Abuse and Mental health guidelines, they were running at 95 percent capacity, and 70 percent of the patients were attending sessions regularly.

The AAC also believes there should be alternatives for those who do not show positive results from a 12-step structure. Searching for accreditation could also be key. The Commission on Accreditation of Rehabilitation Facilities (CARF), could help individuals looking for treatment find a facility with CARF accreditation, as it would have had to pass specific high-quality standards to receive the title.

Hope

Rhea was an active meth user for two years. She was ordered to Meridian IOP rehabilitation facility in Muncie, Indiana after being released from jail the first time. The treatment was not effective in keeping her clean. After going to jail for a second time, Rhea finally decided to confront her addiction head on. She had two children at home and was tired of feeling as if she was failing as a parent. So Rhea enrolled in a 12-step program, Reformers Unanimous, and any other recovery program she could find.

She has now been clean for 4 years and 8 months. Rhea sees her faith in god, family, friends, and the recovery community as the source for helping her get clean and stay clean.

Although many stories of failure are logged in rehabilitation, some do pull out of addiction. With the help and support of family and friends, and professionals who are adamant about getting their patients clean for good, some people do turn their lives around completely.

It is hard not to ponder how many more success stories could be told if there were a radical uprooting and reform to the entire criminal justice system system—affording addicts the opportunity and guidance they deserve.

“I am living proof that there is hope for addicts.” - Rhea