Specialty Court Recidivism

Ideally the drug testing would find individuals positive for drugs and offer them rehabilitation programs. These programs could help them get the support they need to transition back into the workforce drug-free. This would slowly increase the workforce size, increase productivity, and eventually decrease the number of welfare participants with drug problems. It could be cost-effective in the long run. These tests wouldn’t solve all the welfare burden because of people with mental illness or disability, but it would offer healing to those who are addicted to drugs.

"In the 1980s, American states made the decision that sex offenders were not sick; they were bad," LaFond says. "Some states decided to offer treatment, but there wasn 't much hope that it would work. Now, however, there 's an emerging optimism that psychologists can deal with these people and offer alternatives to continued incarceration." Some of that optimism comes from a meta-analysis on the effectiveness of treatment for sex offenders published in Sexual Abuse: A Journal of Research and Treatment (Vol. 14, No.

To combat recidivism, “the National Association of Addiction Treatment Providers, and the American Society of Addiction Medicine (ASAM) worked together to develop the first ASAM Patient Placement Criteria.” (Belenko & Peugh, 2004) ASAM gave guidelines for patient placement of five treatment setting (early intervention to intensive inpatient treatment). Despite the popularity of this program, little evidence is known of the validity in term of treatments. Despite enrolling in these programs, success rates still suffer based on outside forces such as “educational deficits and sporadic work histories, which can affect long-term recovery and complicate the transition back to the community.” (Belenko & Peugh, 2004) This can be related to inmates not having marketable skills or limited employment opportunities which lead to relapse and parole violation. The article goes on to recreate a survey done in 1997 where inmates were randomly selected and interviewed and asked about their “current and past crimes, current and past incarcerations, prison infractions, drug and alcohol use, participation in substance abuse treatment and other programs in and out of prison, and socioeconomic characteristics.” (Belenko & Peugh, 2004) To measure the severity of drug use, the authors developed a five-point scale from least to most severe (one being “never used

In addition, later in her article, Dreifuss goes further on her claim including prisoners as those needing equal detox treatment. Dreifuss says “If the goal is to keep people alive these treatments need to be available on demand… including people in prison.” Dreifuss’s solution for helping those in prison is rather simple and avoids controversy. She advocates the use of naloxone, which is the same drug that can help bring users back from overdoses and is also endorsed by many medical officials. Her article is very complete and offers many solutions to fighting the heroin epidemic. Coupled with heroin usage, Dreifuss advises the U.S to try and reduce usage of a drug very similar fentanyl.

The answer is overcrowding, unsafe work environments, higher cost of living, more aggression from inmates higher turnover rates form staff and loss of jobs for others higher taxes for counties that have to help fill the finical deficit. Nothing good can come from the consolidation of jails to try in cut cost. In terms of how it affects crime, inmates who are housed in jails or other detention facilities are there for a reason and have been found by a judge to serve x amount of time for the crime they committed. With the consolidation of jails and an overcrowding. Facilities are going to have no choice other than to start releasing inmates who don’t pose a great deal of threat in reoffending.

However, is incarceration the answer to who society deems a menace, absolutely not. The overrepresentation of men and women of color, and people incarcerated for drug offenses are the effect of some changes that were made in the list forty years. Most of the people who are in prison are in prison for a reason, and that reason is because of sentencing policy. It is worth mentioning the jail and prison is sometimes the answer, however it should not be the answer for some low-level offenders. The recent laws and policy are the reasons why the prison and jail population have increased, and why people stay for longer.

Essentially, the war on drugs has demonstrated to be an exorbitant expense. The federal government in 2002 alone spent $18.822 billion in the form of expenditures such as treatment, prevention, and domestic law enforcement (CSDP, 2007, p. 54). However, given that the drug war has garnered meager results, this investment may be interpreted as a waste of taxpayer dollars. Alternatively, the money that has been allocated to arrest and detain drug offenders may also be a source of contention. CSDP (2007) “Of the 1,846,351 arrests for drug law violations in 2005, 81.7% (1,508,469) were for possession of a controlled substance.

One of the harshest ways a juvenile can be punished is by serving a term of life in prison. Most do not know a lot about the factors that help the court make this decision. In Carmichael’s article, he states that throughout the most recent decades, laws controlling transfer provisions, and sentencing legislation have made movement towards making sanctions for adolescent offenders more reformatory (2012). These approaches have led to an expanding number of juveniles being adjudicated in an adult criminal court and the youth’s that are sentenced are serving longer sentences than planned (602). In 2012, almost seven thousand inmates were serving life sentences for crimes they committed as juveniles (603).

When discussing prison reform, success is often difficult to measure. One measure of success that the government uses is the recidivism rate. If the rate is lower it means that more inmates are adjusting to life outside of prison. If the rate is higher, like it is now, then prisoners are struggling to gain a footing in society and are going back to prison. As a current measure of success, a recidivism rate that is upwards of fifty percent in most states shows that prison reform and the prison system is failing.

Now if the CCA lose money if the prisoners gets out of prison why would they have these programs? Well they claim to have these programs that help the inmates prepare to reenter the world, but Paul Reynolds who was a corrections officer at the privately owned lake Erie prison claims in an interview "You get them into system, get them in prisons, and you’re warehousing them, you keep them there and you charge the state as much as you can for them and put very little back in return to those inmates. Basically, there’s no rehabilitation when it comes to privatization like this"(Shevardnadze). Reynolds witness how the CCA runs prisons and saw that there is basically no rehabilitation program unlike the CCA claims. Then again why would they have such program that would make them lose profits in the future.