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Real Rehabilitation

Uploaded by wjswitzer on Oct 29, 2004

Instead of throwing drug offenders in jail and hoping for the best, why not try to treat them? Treatment is ten times more cost effective than law enforcement. It costs fifteen times less to treat a person than it costs to put them in jail (Rydell 16). Tax dollars that are being spent on an obsolete program (the present “War on Drugs”) could be spent on treatment, a proven method of decreasing the use and sale of illicit drugs. The American legal system should draft a bill in Congress that gives treatment to drug offenders instead of throwing them in jail. Such a bill would be advantageous to American society as a whole, and benefits would arise from an economic and civil rights standpoint as soon as the bill was signed into law. Such programs have already shown nothing but positive results in The Netherlands and Switzerland, and I believe that with the right direction America can catch up with the rest of the world.

The first step in creating a functional program to fight the Drug War is to face a few hard facts. A study was conducted to investigate police corruption inside drug cases in New York City. This study showed that police corruption, brutality, and violence were present in every high crime precinct that had a high concentration of minority populations (Cole 23). It found very disturbing cases of corruption and brutality, including cases of police stealing from drug dealers, engaging in unlawful searches and seizures, and lying to justify unlawful searches and arrests in areas with large minority populations (Cole 24). After seeing this information, one might come to the conclusion that most drug offenders are in fact minorities. This is far from the truth. Minority groups are victims of our inadequate system. Not only are most drug offenders white, but five times as many whites use drugs as blacks (hrw.org). Since most of the offenders are white, an intelligent person might come to the conclusion that most people put in jail for drug offences are also white. This is also far from the truth. Blacks make up the great majority of drug offenders sent to prison (hrw.org). It is not a sensible solution to send more white drug offenders to jail. Rather, reducing the use of prison for lower level drug offences and increasing the use of treatment would be an effective way to...

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Uploaded by:   wjswitzer

Date:   10/29/2004

Category:   Drug Policy

Length:   6 pages (1,357 words)

Views:   7221

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