Pubdate: Mon, 26 Jul 1999 Source: Guardian, The (UK) Copyright: Guardian Media Group 1999 Contact: http://www.guardian.co.uk/ Author: Decca Aitkenhead CRACK CRIME, SOMEHOW Drugs lead to crime. The priority, surely, should be treating addiction. Incarceration is not the way to do it By Decca Aitkenhead As boasts go, it is probably not the most sensational of triumphs. A couple of years ago, one in every four prisoners was testing positively for drugs, and now - wait for it - the figure has fallen to one in five! This is the number one boast of the newly published annual prison service report, and it is obviously a piece of good news. It hardly amounts to a declaration of victory in the war on drugs in jail, however, and sure enough, the war continues to be waged, or at least talked about, by the prison service - most recently in a special Commons inquiry. A committee has spent the past few weeks hearing evidence, and among the contributions heard has been the Chief Inspector of Prisons' opinion that at least 10 drug barons operate in every jail, and that mandatory drug testing of prisoners is ‘useless'. Drugs in prison are clearly a serious, ongoing problem. That said, besides the modest fall in positive drug tests, the prison service does now have more good news, for it has a coherent strategy in place for more focused drug testing, and for treatment programmes co-ordinated with outside agencies. The unfortunately-named drug-free wings are being expanded, tighter security is letting fewer drugs in; nearly pounds 80m has been made available to implement all of this. These are positive steps, and in time they should deliver some more modest boasts. The problem with the whole strategy of fighting drugs in prison, however, is that the fight takes place in that most inauspicious of environments: prison. Once an addict becomes an inmate, he has lost his most precious thing, namely liberty, and the law has used up its ultimate sanction - the removal of liberty. The single greatest motivation the law could offer an offender to stop taking drugs is therefore already gone before it has had a chance to work. So it is hardly surprising that a prison sentence can't stop a junkie from continuing to support the addiction which will send him straight back to burgling houses once he's out - but it should make us seriously ask what good it did to send him inside at all. Most hard drug-using prisoners are inside because their addiction drove them to commit crime. Addicts steal an estimated pounds 2.5bn worth of property each year, and about a third of all property crime is driven by drugs; recent research found that two thirds of arrested suspects tested positive for illegal drugs, and in a Manchester study, the figure was 78% and a third had taken heroin. A health department survey of 1,100 addicts suggested they had committed 70,000 crimes in the three months before entering treatment. The logic of these statistics is fairly self-evident: if we could devise a strategy that stopped them taking drugs, these offenders would cease to be offenders, and they would not need to be inside at all. There is a tendency to assume that drug-users are somehow immune from all normal laws of human behaviour, but this is not the case. Mark Kleiman, an American expert on drugs in prison, makes the case that: ‘Of course drug addiction is a disease - but alcoholism, for example, is not a disease of the elbow, it's a disease of the volition. Taking drugs is not an involuntary action, like an epileptic fit.' In the light of this, our current strategy of locking up offending addicts, and randomly testing them for drugs inside, does not look like much of a solution. Only 5% of inmates are tested each month, so a prisoner can expect to go untested for up to 20 months. People break rules if they think that they will get away with it, and this is as true of a crack-addict mugger as it is of you or I when we park on double yellow lines; broadly speaking, prisoners have a bolder attitude than most to risk, or they wouldn't have gambled on crimes that ended up putting them inside. But they still calculate risk like everyone else - and taking drugs in prison is plainly not much of a gamble. The trouble is, if we increase the risk by testing everyone all the time, we waste even more money testing those prisoners who have never taken a drug in their life. A much more effective strategy would be to apply the logic of risk to criminal drug addicts. Instead of sending them to prison, we could sentence them to twice weekly drug tests; a positive test would be punished by custody, thus the law retains the power of its greatest threat. Drugs are powerful, but not irresistible, and addicts need reasons to quit; a US study of wealthy cocaine addicts found that if you rewarded them with sports vouchers worth a meaninglessly small sum of dollars for negative tests, they were strikingly more successful than those offered nothing. Testing needs to function alongside treatment. The problems with treatment programmes inside prison are well-documented and unsurprising, for prison is the opposite of a therapeutic environment, and custodial treatment programmes are seldom more than a side-show within the institutions. As part of a non-custodial sentence, however, compulsory treatment is not a side-show but the whole point of the sentence, and so stands a better chance of success. Compulsory treatment is still a new and fairly problematic idea, for we tend to assume that only voluntary counselling can work. How many drug counsellors does it take to change a lightbulb? Only one, goes the joke, but the lightbulb has to really want to change. This seems like an obvious truth, and yet there is in fact no evidence to support it. Mark Kleiman makes the ancilliary point that purely voluntary treatment is anyway a fallacy, for an addict who elects to be treated is always motivated by the fear of losing something - friends, partner, job, home, or something else. Therefore, to impose the fear of losing liberty would not be qualitatively different. ‘It's not clear from any of the evidence,' he says, ‘that it much matters why the addict is there on the treatment programme.' The interesting fact is that the government has already acknowledged this, and last year it introduced drug treatment and testing orders as an alternative to custodial sentences. Judges have been given the option to impose testing and treatment on an offender whose drug use is identified as the core problem - but this applies in only three pilot areas, and in the first 11 months only 80 such sentences have been passed. ‘The thing is,' a home office spokesman explained, ‘if it's to work, there's got to be a positive commitment from the offender's side. He's got to really want to be part of the programme. It couldn't work if he was a really high drug user.' It is inevitable that some offenders would rather go to prison where they can take drugs than stay outside under conditions where they cannot. But large numbers wouldn't - and they should have the opportunity to find out whether, with sufficient incentive, they could stop taking drugs. Rather than assume the worst - and let offenders assume the worst - we should be starting from the opposite end, and stop locking anyone up until they have proved their inability to quit drugs. The battle against drugs in prison won't begin to work until drug treatment and testing orders are extended, and receive the kind of resources we are currently wasting on locking people up. The easiest way to keep drugs out of prison is, rather obviously, to keep drug addicts out. - --- MAP posted-by: Derek Rea