Originally posted by Timmyboy:
I would like to quote an author Alan Elsner from his book "Gates of Injustice":
"Robert, a Vietnam veteran with a drugs habit, was arrested in Washington, D.C., in a police sting in 1984 with marijuana and PCP in his pocket. At the time, he was working as a junior auditor for the IRS and supportinga son and daughter. He described himself as a recreational user. "I wasn't a junkie. I had it under control. I wasn't hurting no one." he said. The judge wasn't impressed. He sentenced Robert to 4 to 16 years in prison. If he had behaved himself behind bars and stayed clean after his release, Robert could have been done with his sentence relatively quickly and gone on with his life. That's not the way things turned out.
Behind bars, Robert did behave well. He was an education aide, helping fellow inmates to get their GED high school equivalency certificates and also worked as a control room cleark. After five years, he was released on parole. But Robert had not kicked his habit in prison and soon resumed using drugs. He found a job but failed to report regularly to his parole officer. In 1994, he was sent back to prison for violating the terms of his parole. Three years later, he was released again; this time he stayed out for seven months before failing a drugs test. Back he went. In November 1999, Robert emerged yet again but was free for less than two months before a dirty urine test sent him back once more. When I met him in March 2000, Robert was living at a halfway house in Washington D.C., where we was closely supervised and regularly tested for drugs. He had a clerical job that paid $8.75 an hour and was due to move in with his sister six weeks later. He was full of good intentions. "I'm 46 years old. I'm getting too old for this. I want to stay out this time. Since 1984, I have spent 11 years in prison and five years outside, all for one drugs conviction. I have lost my family. I have not been a father to my children. I want to get my own place and take care of myself. I call it regaining responsibility over my life," he told me.
I intended to write a series of article about Robert, hoping to follow his progress over the following months as he tried to reubild his life. But the series never materialized. Two weeks after I met him, Robert failed a drugs test yet again and he was sent back to prison. He broke off contact and refused to talk to me again. His story, which is all too typical, raised serious issues. Robert had committed one drugs possession offense, for which he had served 11 years in prison and counting. Yes, he was an addict with a harmful habit. But he had never committed a violent offense, he was never a big time or even a small time dealer, he was never connected to a gang. Who was he hurting other than himself? Did society get its money worth for the many thousands of dollars spent on his incarceration? Or might there have been a better way?
Robert's case illustrates the dilemma facing the 600,000 prisoners being released from the U.S. prisons every year. Many emerge angry and bitter and even less well equipped to lead an honest life than they were before. As we have seen, drugs are widely availabe behind bars. According to the Office of National Drug Control Policy, 70 to 85 percent of state prison inmates need substance abuse assistance, but only 13 percent receive treatment in prison. A California study found that half of those released from the state's prisons were functionally illiterate. Joan Petersilia, a criminologist with the University of California, Irvine, has studied the lives of parolees. 'They remain largely uneducated, unskilled, and usually without solid family support systems and now they bear the added burdens of a prison record and the distrust and fear that inevitably results. Not surprisingly, most parolees do not succeed, and failure occurs rather quickly: re-arrests are most common in the first six months after release.' she wrote."