While Some Politicians Question Cost Of Incarcerating Drug Offenders, Big Money and Bigger Forfeitures Keeps Texas Tough On Drug Crime
By: Houston Criminal Lawyer John Floyd and Paralegal Billy Sinclair
An increasing number of states have abandoned the traditional notion that the best way to combat drug use and trafficking is through the costly practice of extended incarceration. TheWall Street Journal last month reported that Kentucky joined the ranks of South Carolina, Colorado and New York to enact laws that shift spending into less expensive and more effective rehabilitation and intensive drug testing programs. Delaware, Florida, Indiana, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania are currently considering bills that would reduce drug penalties and direct some drug defendants into treatment programs.
The newspaper reported that while these drug law changes “are part of broader belt-tightening efforts, they also reflect a growing belief among state lawmakers that prosecuting drug offenders aggressively often fails to treat their underlying addiction problems and can result in offenders cycling in and out of prisons for years …” Many of these lawmakers are conservative Republicans, like State Senator Tom Jensen in Kentucky, who said he had long “bought into the tough-on-crime concept” and embracing the “rehabilitative model” has been “an education process.”
But not all conservative-leaning people are convinced. For example, Scott Burns, executive director of the National District Attorneys Association, told the WSJ that “you need to have serious consequences or repercussions in place if people use heroin, Oxycontin and other drugs.” Aaron Negangard, chairman of the Indiana Prosecuting Attorneys Council, agreed: “Crime will go up in five to 10 years and people will wonder why. It’s because we are letting too many people out of prison.”
FBI crime-gathering data shows that between 1980 and 2009 drug arrests in this country climbed from approximately 580,000 to 1.6 million. Texas was one of the states that watched its prison population rise exponentially until 2007 when, as WSJ reported, the state “began shifting more drug offenders away from prison, which helped hold down the inmate population. The changes cost $241 million, less than half what the state anticipated it would have spent to build three new prisons. The impact on the crime rate isn’t clear.”
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