Break the Addiction to Punishment : Crime: California’s get-tough approach hasn’t made a dent, especially on drugs. Treatment programs may be the answer.

The United States has embraced imprisonment as its major response to crime and drug abuse. And California, ever the trendsetter, is showing the way, literally with a vengeance.

The state now holds the dubious distinction of leading the nation in the number of people behind bars, boasting 34,000 more prisoners than runner-up New York. One of every eight American prisoners is confined in California.

As we conclude in the new RAND book, “Urban America: Policy Choices for Los Angeles and the Nation,” the state locks up too many people, locks too many of them up for the wrong offenses, and has too little to show for it in enhanced public safety.

Over the last decade, the number of persons imprisoned in California--sentenced to at least one year of incarceration--leaped from 20,000 to 106,000. That dramatic increase was driven less by a corresponding rise in crime than by tougher criminal justice policies.

Harshness permeates every corner of the system. For example, with 11% of the U.S. population, California now accounts for 20% of the juveniles locked up.

The evidence suggests that these expensive and intrusive punishment policies have had moderate success at best in controlling crime. While the prison population zoomed, California crime rates remained basically stable.

But it is with drug offenses that the get-tough strategy seems most marked--and misplaced. Between 1980 and 1990, California felony drug arrests doubled (to 84,000) while the number of commitments to state prison for drug crimes rose more than 10 times (to more than 10,000) and the number of jail commitments more than tripled (to 33,800). Drug offenders accounted for 26% of California prisoners in 1990, up from 11% in 1980.

The emphasis on imprisonment is particularly questionable for drug offenders. Although the policy is intended to make drugs more expensive and harder to obtain, cocaine and heroin were cheaper and just as available in 1990 as in 1980.

In any case, neither effect is likely to be strong in the late stages of a drug epidemic, which is where we are now. The primary reason there are few new users is because most young people now recognize that hard drugs are dangerous, not because drugs have become so expensive. Today’s drug market is increasingly dominated by aging, experienced users whose demand for drugs is likely to be quite insensitive to price.

High imprisonment rates are also ineffective in substantially thinning the ranks of street drug dealers. They are easily replaceable, again because of the price mechanism. When drug dealing becomes riskier, prices will rise until they attract a sufficient number of dealers to meet the slightly reduced consumption.

The particular risks of being a young adult in the inner-city are no longer of drug use but rather of drug selling. Recent studies have found that young people in poor urban communities are entering the sales end of the drug business before they themselves have become users. They see dealing as a path of economic mobility and greatly underestimate their chances of going to prison.

Wielding the rod is a seductive form of empowerment, particularly for officials frustrated by their inability to change the behavior of their charges. That is why modern societies prohibit corporal punishment. Frustrated by our inability to reduce serious crimes and drug use, we seem to be emphasizing punishment for the satisfaction of it. Such policies have enormous financial implications, however. California’s prison system now swallows 6% of the state’s general-fund budget, up from just 2% a decade ago.

Most experts now agree that the hard-nosed approach has been costly and ineffective, that we must rededicate ourselves to providing more and better treatment for substance abusers. Drug treatment has a bad name because few of its clients avoid relapse. Despite low retention and high relapse rates, however, treatment seems to yield substantial benefits in lower drug use and crime rates.

The public treatment system, dealing with a particularly difficult population of addicts, has vastly fewer resources per patient than the private, insurance-funded network. Yet even at up to $10,000 a year, the cost of drug treatment is half that of maintaining an inmate in prison. If alleviating California’s crime and drug problems is our goal, making quality drug treatment available to drug-dependent arrestees is likely to accomplish a great deal more than further expansion of the prison system.

We spent the 1980s getting tougher. Let’s devote the 1990s to getting smarter.