Want to Reduce Drug-related Crime? Try Treatment
Here are a couple of excerpts from the Justice Policy Institute’s Policy Brief, Substance Abuse and Public Safety. The full policy brief provides a great deal of useful information about drug treatment, but at 17 pages (including 59 footnotes) it’s too lengthy to include the whole report in Justice Matters. We’re sharing part of it with our readers to help you see the research that demonstrates the significant payback of investing money on drug treatment.
The Justice Policy Institute is a Washington, D.C.-based think tank dedicated to ending society’s reliance on incarceration and promoting effective and just solutions to social problems.
Substance Abuse Treatment and Public Safety
“Providing drug-abusing offenders with comprehensive treatment saves lives and protects communities.”—Dr. Nora D. Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse(1)
From the introduction:
The United States leads the world in the number of people incarcerated in federal and state correctional facilities. There are currently more than 2 million people in American prisons or jails. Approximately one-quarter of those people held in U.S. prisons or jails have been convicted of a drug offense. The United States incarcerates more people for drug offenses than any other country. With an estimated 6.8 million Americans struggling with drug abuse or dependence, the growth of the prison population continues to be driven largely by incarceration for drug offenses.
… the Justice Policy Institute (JPI) has compared state data on drug treatment admissions to incarceration rates. While no single solution will guarantee that a person will not be involved in criminal activity and the literature is not conclusive on what single factor might solve every community’s various challenges, the research suggests that increased investments in drug treatment can have a positive public safety benefit.
Significant findings include:
- Increases in admissions to substance abuse treatment are associated with reductions in crime.
- Increased admissions to drug treatment are associated with lower incarceration rates.
- Substance abuse treatment prior to contact with the justice system yields public safety benefits early on.
- Treatment helps people make the transition from the criminal justice system to the community.
- Drug treatment is more cost-effective than prison or other punitive measures.
From page 3:
1) Increases in admissions to substance abuse treatment are associated with reductions in crime.
There is currently a debate among criminologists and researchers as to what factors were responsible for the crime drop in the 1990s that brought the nation’s crime rate to historic lows and kept them at a low rate into this decade. Some researchers have noted that increased investments in prevention, increased employment and wage rates, and changes in policing practices were associated with the crime drop. Various researchers have shown that increased use of imprisonment during this time was responsible for no more than 20 to 25 percent of the crime drop and that further increases in the incarceration rate would have diminishing returns on public safety. The crime drop also occurred during a time when the nation experienced a significant increase in the number of people being admitted to drug treatment programs.
Increased national treatment admissions and increased federal spending on substance abuse treatment have been matched by a smaller number of incidents of violent crime and a lower national violent crime rate. Since 16.6 percent of state prisoners and 18.4 percent of federal prisoners committed their crimes to get money for drugs, lowering the demand for drugs by providing treatment for people with drug abuse problems may have had public safety benefits.
From page 9:
3) Substance abuse treatment prior to contact with the justice system yields public safety benefits early on.
Substance-involved individuals* have come to compose a large portion of the prison population, and substance use may play a part in the commission of certain crimes. According to a recent Bureau of Justice Statistics report, Unordered list:
- 53 percent of state prisoners and 45 percent of federal prisoners meet criterion of drug
- abuse or dependence;
- 16.6 percent of state prisoners and 18.4 percent of federal prisoners committed their
- crimes to obtain money for drugs;
- one in three state prisoners reported using drugs at the time of their offense, and one in
- four violent offenders reported drug use at the time of their crime; and
- 64 percent of state prisoners who committed a property offense reported drug use in the
- month prior to arrest, and 38 percent reported use during the time of the offense.
Participation in a drug treatment program has been shown to reduce the chances that a drug-involved person will commit crime. The National Treatment Improvement Evaluation Study (NTIES) showed that drug treatment significantly reduced respondents’ self-reported criminal activity: a 78.3 percent reduction in drug selling, an 81.6 percent decline in shoplifting, a 64.3 percent reduction in arrests for any crime, and a 48.3 percent reduction in supporting themselves through illegal activities.
The full report, Substance Abuse and Public Safety, is available on the web on the Justice Policy's website.
This article was originally printed in the Summer 2008 issue of Justice Matters
