Substance Abuse And DOC’s Revolving Door

The construction of the Garner Correctional Institution in Newtown, which opened in 1992, was part of a statewide initiative costing more than a billion dollars to accommodate the state’s growing population of prisoners by adding almost 10,000 more prison beds around the state. Public support for tougher sentencing and less tolerance for criminal behavior spawned by poverty, substance abuse, and gangs resulted in laws that put ever-increasing numbers of men and women behind bars. The state had about 3,800 prisoners in 1980. Now there are about 18,000, and the state Department of Corrections (DOC) has plans to add about 1,600 more prison beds through prison expansion. The prisons became so crowded that last year the state shipped 500 prisoners to Virginia. Despite all the high-tech security features at Garner and other state-of-the-art prisons, there is one weakness at the facilities that corrections officials have been unable to get rid of: the revolving door.

Despite all the money and energy expended on Connecticut’s correctional system, inmates are leaving prisons with same set of habits, addictions, and anti-social behaviors they went in with. And the cost to society is staggering. The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University just released a nationwide study that showed the impact of drugs, alcohol, and cigarettes is costing states as much as they spend on higher education. Looking at statistics from 1998, the study found that Connecticut spends $873 million, or 7.6 percent of its budget, on costs associated directly and indirectly with substance abuse. Yet just three percent of state expenditures on substance abuse are directed toward prevention and treatment. The bulk of the money goes to care for prisoners with drug problems and health programs. The Columbia report recommends that states spend more money on treatment and prevention, especially among prisoners, to keep them from committing more drug-related crimes when they are released. It seems that this message may have finally hit home in Connecticut.

When Governor Rowland delivers his budget message this month, it is expected to include a new emphasis on drug treatment and rehabilitation in the prisons. The Prison and Jail Overcrowding Commission, which included Lt Governor Jodi Rell and Corrections Commissioner John Armstrong, issued a report last month that recommended the expansion of drug treatment programs in the jails. It also recommended the creation of a 500-bed “community justice center” that would prepare prisoners for release by addressing their substance abuse problems and other habituated behaviors that routinely land them back in jail. Similar criminal justice reforms have helped reduce recidivism rates in other states. Lawmakers who back the reforms are predicting that the state’s prison population will finally stabilize and even decline significantly in coming years once the reforms are in place.

Newtown has a history of resisting the DOC, first when Garner was first proposed, and in subsequent years when expansion of the facility was contemplated. Prisons are not nice places and will always be a source of concern for their host communities. But we should applaud and encourage the DOC in this new initiative to reduce the economic and social costs of substance abuse behind prison walls before it gets a chance to spill back out in the community. We should support every effort to remove from Connecticut’s prisons, once and for all, that revolving door.