This is an opinion column.
Drugs put people in prison. They keep people in prison. They kill people in prison.
More than 2,000 people are in Alabama prisons directly because of drug charges. That doesn’t seem like much in a system that houses more than 20,000 people. But that’s only a tiny bit of the story. According to the Alabama Sentencing Commission 80% to 90% of felony cases are linked in some way to drugs. That’s thousands more cases.
“Either the defendant was under some influence of a drug or alcohol, or they were committing the crime to acquire funds to obtain a drug,” the commission said in a recent report.
Drugs return people to prison.
“I feel comfortable saying 70% to 80% of (parole) revocations involve some sort of substance abuse that led them to commit a new crime,” said Cam Ward, director of the Alabama Bureau of Pardons and Paroles.
And of course they kill.
Alabama’s rate of death in prison is far higher than the national average. The U.S. Justice Department has lambasted the Alabama Department of Corrections as a place that can’t stop a tidal wave of drugs. Those drugs lead to sexual abuse, violence over drug debts, and death.
Alabama is doing it terribly wrong.
Alabama suffers crime because of drugs, it punishes people because of drugs, it builds billion dollar prisons and signs billion dollar prison healthcare deals because its justice system is overrun by the consequences of drugs. It forces people to spend lifetimes in prison because of drugs, it uses the presence of drugs as an excuse to put addicts back inside, and if it put a fraction of the effort into rehabilitation it would save more people, more money and more families.
The Prison Policy Initiative last week issued a national report about this very topic, saying cops, lawmakers, even family members worried about the addictions of their loved ones, often believe a stint in jail might be the thing that saves their sons or daughters or fathers or mothers.
But it’s a myth, that group says. Prisons and jails across America, and certainly in Alabama, rarely use the best methods for treating addiction, and more often leave addicts to struggle on their own behind bars.
In Alabama that means surviving in places where drugs are not only abundant, but deadly in unthinkable ways.
As the DOJ put it in a lawsuit against Alabama prisons, “the use of illicit substances, including methamphetamines or Fentanyl and synthetic cannabinoids, is prevalent in Alabama’s Prisons for Men. Prisoners using illicit substances often harm others or become indebted to other prisoners. The inability to pay drug debts leads to beatings, kidnappings, stabbings, sexual abuse, and homicides.”
So people die, rather than be released with a chance of redemption. Like Daniel Williams last year. People are attacked, like a Bibb Correctional Facility prisoner cited by the feds, who was stabbed as he was sleeping, over and over again, by a man who said the victim owed him money for drugs, so he “got it in blood.”
Like a man at Draper prison, also cited by DOJ, who blacked out on meth, and realized only after he woke up that he had been raped. The DOJ cites multiple cases where inmates were given drugs so they would be incapacitated and sexually assaulted. Its suit contends drugs found during an autopsy are used to cloud the facts of how prisoners are killed.
Alabama prisons are no place to get away from drugs, much less get help. Few prisons are. As the Prison Policy Initiative puts it, half the people in state prisons in America had a substance abuse disorder, and only 10 percent got any sort of medical treatment at all.
And therein lies the rub.
Addiction affects people across demographic lines, across income levels, across everything. But those who can pay for effective medical treatment outside of prisons are far more likely to avoid the horrors of the inside.
On average, a person seeking residential drug rehab in Alabama can expect to pay $58,607, according to the National Center for Drug Abuse Statistics. That’s in a state where the median family income – per family, not per person – is $59,609.
It is simply impossible for many people in Alabama to afford that. Alabama is among the poorest states in America with a poverty rate above 16%. And in Alabama, just four facilities offer free drug rehab treatment for all clients.
Getting clean is a full time job, and it costs full time pay.
Nationally, the average cost of drug detoxification can run you about the same as a house in Montgomery. One series of Methadone treatments – one as a “per episode cost – can reach as much as a brand new Nissan Versa. A three-month stint at inpatient rehab will cost about $36,000, the NCDAS says. Alabama, the group says, is one of the more expensive states to get drug treatment.
And that’s if you can get it at all.
“Alabama is a state with fewer active substance abuse centers than its peers,” the NCDAS says.
But few things come at a cost as substantial as a stint in Alabama prisons, where paroles have been nearly stopped, where violence is a constant, where lives are destroyed and redemption denied.
And Alabama knows it.
The state’s own $824,114 grant proposal for treatment of prisoners in 2022 acknowledged that “drug-connected crime, which leads to initial incarceration and subsequent recidivism, is a major factor in prison overcrowding, and the overcrowding aspect then affects the economic factors involved in housing a growing prison population.”
The state’s prisons are at 168% capacity, contributing to the violence and the lack of help.
We know addiction is a major cause of crime. We pay billions of dollars to house addicts in horrific prisons where addictions only get worse, and more dangerous. We hand them draconian sentences, deny almost all of them parole, even though we know treatment is more effective than punishment.
Alabama’s strategy is inhumane, expensive and stubborn. Most importantly, it’s a terrible way to keep law-abiding Alabamians from becoming future victims.
They call it being tough on crime. What they should call it is ineffective.
John Archibald is a two-time Pulitzer winner at AL.com.
This project was completed with the support of a grant from Columbia University’s Ira A. Lipman Center for Journalism and Civil and Human Rights in conjunction with Arnold Ventures.