The One Time When Incarceration Is Necessary to Handling Addiction
Incarceration is never fun.
While you may be in for a crime such as possession of marijuana, your cellmate may be there for armed robbery, aggravated assault, rape or even murder.
You may have to use the bathroom in front of others, share communal showers, enjoy no privacy and be confined inside a dreary building for most of your days and nights.
Worse, the food is notoriously bad, there are few opportunities for recreation, and there is the ever present threat of being attacked or even raped by fellow prisoners.
Life in jail or prison can be best compared to a jungle, where everyone is looking out for himself and you often find yourself being forced to fight for what's yours and to defend your health and safety.
Even after release, the person still has to live with the major social stigma attached to having been convicted of a crime, a fact which can make it impossible to find suitable employment.
While it may seem to be obviously necessary to put convicted thieves, rapists and murderers behind bars, a large share of all the men and women who are serving time are there for drug-related crimes.
Most of them, furthermore, are not there for involvement in major drug trafficking organizations or drug manufacturing operations.
The majority of drug crime offenders serving time are there because they were caught in possession of drugs.
These people were not harming others, and they are essentially being punished because they are addicted to drugs.
The United States now has the largest prison population in the world, both in terms of total prisoners and per capita imprisonment.
More than 1 in 100 Americans is living behind bars.
Over the past 30 years, the prison population has quadrupled, due in large part to tougher sentencing laws for drug crimes.
There are now 12 times as many people in prison for drug offenses as there were in 1980, and in 2000 one-fifth of those in prison were there based on drug-related convictions.
What most of these people need is rehabilitation, not punishment.
They are behind bars not because they harmed anyone else, but because they have become addicted to substances which have been made illegal.
How Prison Can Help an Addict Prison may, however, be necessary under certain circumstances.
Whereas research has demonstrated that drug rehab treatment is far more effective at preventing recidivism than imprisonment alone, there are some people who simply will not mend their ways until they have reached rock bottom and have spent enough time removed from their normal lives in order to make meaningful changes in attitude and outlook.
This is primarily when the person's drug use has become such a major problem that he or she is no longer harming only himself or herself, but has actually become an active menace to others in the community.
If the drug addict is stealing or committing violent crime in order to get more drugs or money to buy more drugs, there may be no other immediate solution than incarceration.
The time spent behind bars can serve to help the prisoner to detoxify from the effects of the drugs, as well as making it easier to reflect on life and make changes of attitude.
In addition, it may even be possible to begin working on drug rehab during the time in prison.
The National Institute on Drug Abuse reports that approximately one-fifth of the prisoners in the United States receive drug rehab while serving time in prison.
The prison sentence gives a hardcore addict the chance to turn his or her lie and around in more ways than one.
While you may be in for a crime such as possession of marijuana, your cellmate may be there for armed robbery, aggravated assault, rape or even murder.
You may have to use the bathroom in front of others, share communal showers, enjoy no privacy and be confined inside a dreary building for most of your days and nights.
Worse, the food is notoriously bad, there are few opportunities for recreation, and there is the ever present threat of being attacked or even raped by fellow prisoners.
Life in jail or prison can be best compared to a jungle, where everyone is looking out for himself and you often find yourself being forced to fight for what's yours and to defend your health and safety.
Even after release, the person still has to live with the major social stigma attached to having been convicted of a crime, a fact which can make it impossible to find suitable employment.
While it may seem to be obviously necessary to put convicted thieves, rapists and murderers behind bars, a large share of all the men and women who are serving time are there for drug-related crimes.
Most of them, furthermore, are not there for involvement in major drug trafficking organizations or drug manufacturing operations.
The majority of drug crime offenders serving time are there because they were caught in possession of drugs.
These people were not harming others, and they are essentially being punished because they are addicted to drugs.
The United States now has the largest prison population in the world, both in terms of total prisoners and per capita imprisonment.
More than 1 in 100 Americans is living behind bars.
Over the past 30 years, the prison population has quadrupled, due in large part to tougher sentencing laws for drug crimes.
There are now 12 times as many people in prison for drug offenses as there were in 1980, and in 2000 one-fifth of those in prison were there based on drug-related convictions.
What most of these people need is rehabilitation, not punishment.
They are behind bars not because they harmed anyone else, but because they have become addicted to substances which have been made illegal.
How Prison Can Help an Addict Prison may, however, be necessary under certain circumstances.
Whereas research has demonstrated that drug rehab treatment is far more effective at preventing recidivism than imprisonment alone, there are some people who simply will not mend their ways until they have reached rock bottom and have spent enough time removed from their normal lives in order to make meaningful changes in attitude and outlook.
This is primarily when the person's drug use has become such a major problem that he or she is no longer harming only himself or herself, but has actually become an active menace to others in the community.
If the drug addict is stealing or committing violent crime in order to get more drugs or money to buy more drugs, there may be no other immediate solution than incarceration.
The time spent behind bars can serve to help the prisoner to detoxify from the effects of the drugs, as well as making it easier to reflect on life and make changes of attitude.
In addition, it may even be possible to begin working on drug rehab during the time in prison.
The National Institute on Drug Abuse reports that approximately one-fifth of the prisoners in the United States receive drug rehab while serving time in prison.
The prison sentence gives a hardcore addict the chance to turn his or her lie and around in more ways than one.