Hooked Behind Stone Walls

A bill by state Sen. Richard Polanco hits the Assembly floor today for a vote on creating “community correctional centers” for women that would provide better drug treatment than that available in prisons and would separate nonviolent addicts from violent, hardened inmates. The facilities would be operated outside prison walls by private firms or public agencies.

Aides to the Los Angeles Democrat say that the bill is a cost-saver and one good answer for the type of rampant drug abuse found at the Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla and described in a recent Times report. Is it a good idea? Maybe, but the program ought to start as a trial project testing the effectiveness of community facilities compared to drug treatment within prisons.

Finding a test group would not be hard. Pick any spot on a U.S. map and you’re probably not far from a jail or prison system with a thriving and deeply entrenched trade in illicit drugs.

New York, Tennessee, Ohio, South Carolina, Illinois, Britain, New Zealand and Australia are just a few of the places where the problem and potential remedies have been discussed by worried officials. The drugs enter the prisons through diverse sources, including guards, infirmary workers, delivery personnel and visitors. Crack cocaine can be secreted in potatoes. Heroin can arrive within resealed tuna cans. Small balloons of drugs can be passed from visitor to inmate by a kiss, swallowed and then salvaged later by induced vomiting.

The crisis has been met by a variety of suppression techniques: restrictions on visits involving physical contact, drug-sniffing dogs, random inmate drug tests and regular searches of all prison workers before shifts begin.

The problem in America has not reached the radar screen of a public more concerned with ending prison perks for inmates. But this epidemic clearly deserves immediate notice. The cause of peace and justice is not served when prisons are allowed to become factories for drug addiction.