Vallejo Times Herald
October 29, 2008

As an advocate for people seeking recovery from alcohol and drug abuse, I support Proposition 5, the Nonviolent Offender Rehabilitation Act of 2008 (NORA). The focus of this proposition is “treatment vs. incarceration” for nonviolent offenders. If passed, it would make substantial changes in how we deal with nonviolent offenders and provide much needed funds to carry out those changes - resulting in reduced prison populations and increased treatment opportunities.

A recent Zogby Poll of almost 5,000 likely voters indicates that three of four voters believe that the “War on Drugs” is a failure. The U.S. prison population rose 2.8 percent during the 2006 fiscal year, ensuring that we as a nation continue to have more people incarcerated than any other nation. The U.S. Department of Justice reports that prisons added more than 62,000 new inmates bringing the total to more than 2.245 million people behind bars. It also reports that state prison populations rose by 3 percent, county jail populations by 2.5 percent and federal prisons by 3.6 percent. While the United States makes up only 3 percent of the world’s population, at any one time we hold in custody 25 percent of all prisoners world wide.

The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation estimates that 20 percent of the 171,000 inmates incarcerated during 2007 were in custody for drug related offenses. During the same year 125,000 individuals were paroled into the community and 51 percent of those individuals were returned to prison for committing a violation of their parole, 30.1 percent of which were for violations related to drug us. Estimates from a study done by the National Institute on Drug Abuse indicate that less than 10 percent of inmates who need addiction treatment actually receive services.

Studies by the Justice Policy Institute indicate that increases in admissions to substance abuse treatment are associated with reductions in crime rates, thus leading to reductions in incarceration rates. The institute also concluded that treatment helps individuals transition successfully from the criminal justice system to the community and that substance abuse treatment is more cost effective than prison or other punitive measures.

States throughout America are reexamining policies related to cost effective ways of impacting the problems that lead to incarceration. CDCR has an annual budget of $10 billion, the California Legislative Analyst Office has estimated that enacting the provisions of NORA could cost $385 million per year for adult treatment services and $65 million for juvenile treatment services, but could save up to $1 billion buy reducing the incarceration rate for nonviolent offenders. Additional savings, estimated at $2.6 billion, could be realized by reduced capital outlay for building new prisons.

To this point policy makers have lacked the political will to take on the criminal justice system, NORA gives the voters of California an opportunity to change a system that is on the verge of collapse and provide treatment services to both nonviolent adults and juveniles.

Lloyd W. Gieg
Executive director, Genesis House, Inc.
Vallejo