I think I might have a unpopular perspective but when I was incarcerated for 2 years 11 days it gave me a chance to get away from drugs for that period. Although the environment hardly supported addiction recovery, the high cost and irregular supply made drug use unsustainable. If I had made parole and gotten out after a year, I would have been right back into hard drugs. Allow me to add that I had a pretty much uninterrupted 30 or so year addiction to opiates.
Wow, I never thought about prisons as commitment devices for drug addicts. Thanks for sharing your experience.
Despite the usefulness of prison in your case, there is plenty of research showing that alternative means to incarceration are better for everybody (for the offenders and the taxpayers). For example, this paper shows a drop of 40% in recidivism for electronic monitoring instead of incarceration: http://www.nber.org/papers/w15602. Also, there is a lot of evidence from drug courts. This is one example: https://crimesolutions.gov/ProgramDetails.aspx?ID=70.
Good comment. I was going to say that while prison might work for some with addictions, it certainly does not teach them anything about staying away from drugs. In many cases recidivism is high because these people who remained sober for the duration of their sentence get out and fall right back into it within a few months. They might have trouble finding jobs due to a record, or maybe they were incarcerated long enough that they lost old, good connections or have bad ones they made while incarcerated. It might just be a matter of time until they fall back into usage as an escape mechanism.
There's just very many ways that going to prison hurts a person and very few ways that helps, and only for the right kind of people too (ex: longterm drug abuser with a lack of self control relinquishing his rights in this case).
I was fortunate enough to get into rehab after only two stints in jail, and have remained sober from heroin and cocaine for 10+ years. However during the time in jail for crimes related to my addiction the only thing on my mind the entire stay was, "can't wait to get out of here and get that first dose again".
It is especially hard to think about bettering yourself and getting help when you're around countless other people basically glorifying the problem from which you suffer.
>However during the time in jail for crimes related to my addiction the only thing on my mind the entire stay was, "can't wait to get out of here and get that first dose again".
Speaking to someone who had recently been released, he talked about people shooting up in the car two minutes after being released. Friends and sometimes even family members would be there to meet them at their release and would bring along drugs for them to consume at the first possible instant as some kind of "welcome back" present.
Well I imagine with this in place, you would get drug tested regularly, and if you fail those tests eventually you would actually go to jail since you would not be respecting what you need to do?
