In yesterday's D&C, the mother of a young crystal meth chemist tells how she expressed her love for her son by calling the cops. He's now spending some time jail, and the D&C is worried that crank is coming to Rochester.
In other news, a few weeks ago Mayor Duffy raised a stink about a plan to locate a new facility to treat violent sex offenders at the Rochester Psychiatric Center on Elmood Avenue. That location is right across the street from the Al Sigl center, which serves 2,000 developmentally disabled children and adults daily.
These two issues might seem unrelated, but leave it to California to find a way to address them both in one fell swoop.
Proposition 36 is a California ballot initiative that mandated treatment instead of incarceration for non-violent drug offenders. According to the Economist [subscriber-only link], Prop 36 has saved over $800 million in direct inmate costs, and another $500 million in prison construction costs, since it went into effect in 2001. California has 15,000 fewer prison inmates today than were projected in 2000, the year Prop 36 passed.
Prop 36 is no panacea: around 30% of those who are mandated treatment never show up, and only 25% of the rest actually complete treatment. These statistics are discouraging, but it's not as if those offenders would have beaten their addiction in prison. Legislation is pending in California to jail users for short periods if they don't show up for rehab. Perhaps this will increase the number of users who are treated, but in the end, drug addiction is difficult to beat. Prop 36 just gives users a better shot than time in stir, with the added benefit that taxpayers aren't paying for three hots and a cot while the user tries to kick.
New York State should learn from California's experience. Instead of putting the most hard-core, violent and recidivist sex offenders in a facility within shouting distance of a school for disabled children, how about making some room for them in one of our many existing prisons? All we need to do is treat drug users like Rochester's "first" crystal meth cooker as an outpatient, rather than an inmate. Seems like a fair trade to me.
