New York Times
Thursday, December 9, 1999
Top U.S. Drug Official Proposes
Shift in Criminal Justice Policy
By CHRISTOPHER S. WREN
Washington, Dec 8
The Clinton administration's top official on drug policy has proposed a strategy of integrating drug testing and treatment into virtually every phase of the criminal justice process, from arrests to incarceration and after release from prison.The White House's director of national drug policy, Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey, long a proponent of treatment, laid out a detailed case for his strategy on Tuesday and today to 900 law-enforcement, prison and public health specialists who converged from around the country to discuss how to break the intractable cycle between substance abuse and crime.
General McCaffrey told them that the present criminal justice system was a "disaster" that had put tens of thousands of drug offenders behind bars without treating the addictions that had put them there.
The three-day assembly, which concludes on Thursday, was called by the White House Office of National Drug Control, the Department of Justice and the Department of Health and Human Services to mobilize support for their belief that drug treatment works, even when it is forced upon prisoners in custody.
"Take back what you've learned from this conference," Attorney General Janet Reno told the delegates today. "Know you're on the right track."
Refining an argument that he has been advancing for months, General McCaffrey said an estimated 50 percent to 85 percent of the 1.8 million inmates in American prisons and jails were there fundamentally because of compulsive use of psychoactive drugs or alcohol.
The general began promoting the need for treatment shortly after he took the White House post in 1996. Drug treatment programs are now in 26 of the 42 federal prisons.
A study prepared by the White House drug control office estimated that drug treatment in prison would add another $3,000 to the $20,000 or more a year spent to incarcerate an inmate, but that money would be saved in the long run because treatment would reduce the number of people returning to prison.
"It's going to cost a lot less than we're spending," the general said.
To get the money, the administration must sell its strategy not only to Congress, but also to state and local politicians and law-enforcement officials, who tend toward greater skepticism about the value of treatment for criminals.
The country's penal system, General McCaffrey said, costs taxpayers $38 billion a year, and left unchecked, the prison population will soon reach two million.
The new strategy tries to reconcile two contradictory views of drugs and crime. The criminal justice approach has focused on catching and punishing offenders. The public health approach has argued for treating the addiction that led the offenders to commit crimes.
"We really haven't been adversaries but we haven't been allies either," said Donna E. Shalala, the secretary of Health and Human Services, whose department takes a public health approach.
Assistant Attorney General Laurie Robinson challenged the notion that treating addicts amounted to being soft on crime, saying: "We've got these people in our clutches. Why aren't we being smart about using this opportunity to treat these people? We should be demanding that these people have treatment when they are in the system, because what we're talking about is changing behavior."