A treatment in lieu of incarceration program has had success in Brooklyn, New York.
Drug Treatment Alternatives to Prison (DTAP) is the first prosecution-run program in the country to divert prison-bound felony offenders to residential drug treatment. The program, in Brooklyn, New York, targets drug-addicted defendants arrested for nonviolent felony offenses who have previously been convicted of one or more nonviolent felonies. In March, 2014, The Huffington Post reported on its success:
America’s prisons are dangerously overcrowded, and the war on drugs is mainly to blame. Over 50 percent of inmates currently in federal prison are there for drug offenses, according to an infographic recently released by the Federal Bureau of Prisons (see chart below).
That percentage has risen fairly consistently over decades, all the way from 16 percent in 1970. . . . Brooklyn’s DTAP program, where drug or drug addicted defendants plead guilty to an offense, and then enter a 15 to 24 month residential, therapeutic community treatment system as an alternative to a prison sentence, also saw solid program graduation rates and lower arrest rates. More than half of DTAP participants completed the program, and they stayed in treatment six times longer (a medium of 17.8 month versus 3 months) than those in nationally comparable long-term residential drug treatment.
DTAP participants have arrest rates that were 26 percent lower two years after leaving the program than those of a matched comparison group two years after leaving prison. DTAP participants are 67% less likely to return to prison than the comparison group leaving prison.
Source: DTAP program
Decriminalization of drug use could greatly reduce the U. S. prison population.
StopTheDrugWar has reported that more than 330,000 were doing prison time for drugs in the US at the end of 2011. (supremecourt.gov), including nearly 95,000 doing federal time.
The growth in the federal prison population is largely driven by drug war prisoners. Drug offenders constitute 48% of all federal inmates, or some 94,600 inmates.
By contrast, only 7.6% of federal inmates are doing time for violent crimes.
Among state prisoners, drug offenders accounted for 17%, or slightly fewer than one out of five. That means some 235,000 were doing state prison time on drug charges at the end of 2011, bringing the combined state and federal total to 330,000.
That’s a slight decline over a decade ago, but still represents incalculable human costs, as well as easily calculable financial ones.
Source: More statistics on US incarcerations for drug use
To see Michael Douglas’ portrayal of the first speech as drug czar of his film character, Robert Wakefield, whose [fictional] daughter has committed drug crimes, in the film, Traffic (2000), visit the next page.
