State’s Voters to Decide: Rehab or Prison for Addicts

Drugs got the upper hand early in Irene Garcia’s life.

In kindergarten she saw her father overdose on pills. At 12 she watched her mother deal PCP from their Lincoln Heights home. By her 19th birthday, Garcia was turning tricks in downtown Los Angeles, supporting a crack habit and two children--one born addicted.

“Drugs came first--before my kids, before everything,” Garcia, 34, recalls. “They blocked out the pain, the shame over selling my body, the guilt.”

Garcia is clean now, but for 16 years she bounced in and out of prison, relapsing time and again, her habit governing her every move. California is awash in people with stories like hers. Nearly one in three of the state’s 162,000 prisoners is serving time for a crime related to drugs; about eight in 10 have a history of substance abuse.

Polls show a majority of Californians favor diverting many nonviolent drug possession offenders and parole violators into treatment rather than jail or prison. In what would mark a significant reorientation of the state criminal justice system, Proposition 36 on the November ballot would do that--and allocate $120 million to help them get well.

Graduates of such a drug treatment program could have their convictions erased under the measure. Those who flunk could land in prison.

The initiative comes at a time of mounting dissatisfaction with the nation’s war on drugs. An eclectic coalition of officeholders and scholars--liberal and conservative--say it’s futile to punish addicts with imprisonment, only to have them commit more crimes to sustain their habit after release.

Arizona and New York have retooled their criminal justice systems to reflect such thinking. In Arizona, about 61% of offenders who complete treatment under the state’s voter-approved system succeed, saving taxpayers $2 for every $1 invested. In New York, the state’s chief judge has ordered that all nonviolent criminals who are drug addicts be offered two years of strictly monitored treatment instead of jail, a shift now being phased in over two years.

In California, Proposition 36 is favored by 55% of likely voters, according to one recent poll.

Supporters, Foes, Agree on Essential Points

“America has a problem with drug addiction, and we cannot continue to incarcerate our way out of the crisis,” Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles) said in a recent speech. “This ‘lock ‘em up and throw away the key’ mentality has got to stop.”

The Legislature’s nonpartisan analyst predicts that Proposition 36 would reroute as many as 36,000 drug offenders away from prison and county jails, saving state and local governments up to $250 million a year. The state could save an additional $500 million by avoiding the need to build a new prison, the analyst says.

Unlike the warring camps that gather around most initiatives, foes and supporters of Proposition 36 say they agree on its essential point--that nonviolent addicts who break drug laws need treatment.

Opponents, however, don’t like the treatment model the initiative proposes. They call it “bad policy badly written” and say it would “sabotage” existing “drug courts,” which put some offenders into treatment and use a carrot-stick approach combining counseling and drug tests to keep them clean.

Backers of Proposition 36 say their intent is not to undermine drug courts but to augment them. They contend that the drug courts serve, at most, 7% of the potential pool of offenders--leaving a vast unfilled need.

Judges who run drug courts acknowledge this but say the answer is more money for drug courts--not Proposition 36. The initiative is flawed, they argue, because it bars judges from immediately jailing offenders who test dirty during treatment.

Superior Court Judge Stephen Marcus, who pioneered drug courts in Los Angeles County in 1994, says such “shock incarcerations” are vital to successful treatment: “You need to intervene at the earliest possible time and let them know there are consequences” if they resume their old ways.

Backers of the initiative say it carries consequences aplenty for offenders who stumble. Although those who slip up get two more chances at treatment, the third violation means automatic incarceration for up to three years.

“There is a hammer,” says Cliff Gardner, a San Francisco attorney who wrote Proposition 36. “It may not be the hammer our opponents want, but there is a hammer.”

Gardner also dismisses another criticism--that none of the $120 million allocated for treatment under Proposition 36 can be spent on drug testing, which many professionals consider the key to monitoring the progress of recovering addicts. Proponents did not mean to suggest that testing should not be part of treatment programs authorized by the measure, Gardner says.

“Our point is there’s plenty of money out there for drug testing, and not nearly enough for drug treatment, which is what our initiative is about,” he says.

Garcia could make the case for both foes and backers of Proposition 36. She lives at the Walden House Center for Women and Children in El Monte, a leafy, 2.5-acre compound that helps parolees build new lives. Dressed in a smart green suit, gold earrings and black pumps, her long hair pulled back in barrettes, she is walking proof that drug treatment can rescue even those whose lives are in a desperate tailspin.

At Walden House, a nonprofit facility funded with a public and private dollars, Garcia attends five group counseling sessions a day--meetings on everything from parenting to relapse prevention and building healthy relationships. An eighth-grade dropout, she’s working toward obtaining her GED.

Garcia spent 16 years in a cycle of crack addiction, prostitution and petty crime. She had six babies--four of them drug-addicted--she couldn’t support. She cost taxpayers untold thousands in incarceration costs.

Now full of hope for the future, Garcia acknowledges she’s not sure whether a shot at drug treatment after her first offense--the scenario laid out by Proposition 36--would have cut short her years of misery. She did receive treatment once--in prison--and couldn’t stay clean.

“I came out with good intentions, but I wasn’t ready and I relapsed,” Garcia says. That led to a parole violation, and another trip to prison. Behind bars again, “I sat with myself, quiet, and finally got to where I was ready for help, ready to send the drugs out of my head.”

Savings Expected With New Approach

Nearly 20,000 inmates are serving time for drug possession, and thousands more return to prison when they violate their parole by using or possessing narcotics. Even larger numbers are locked up for burglary, robbery, auto theft and other crimes motivated by a hunger for drugs.

Studies show that for every dollar government invests in treatment, taxpayers save about $7. But recent budget priorities have focused more on building cells, and recovery programs in prisons have long waiting lists. And surveys show drugs are widely available behind bars, smuggled in by visitors or sold by correctional staff.

Chris Vicuna, 38, has served four prison stints, plus shorter stays in jail. A recent parolee, his addiction raged all through that time.

It began in grade school, when Vicuna would chug the beer left over in bottles at the family’s bar in Cudahy. Next came marijuana, then PCP, then heroin. His first arrest, for selling weed, was at 15. His drug problem went untreated, and things got worse and worse.

Each time he was freed from prison, Vicuna took the $200 each inmate gets at the gate and invested it in drugs. A canny dealer, he shaved the skin off almonds, dipped them in Ora-Gel and sold them as rocks of cocaine. He passed off brake fluid as PCP.

When sales were slow, he fed his habit through burglary, carjacking, even robbing push-cart ice cream vendors. Once he blacked out while driving high, and awoke to find himself upside down in his car, the cause of a wreck that sent nine people to the hospital--and landed him in prison yet again.

Vicuna is a burly, tough-looking man with a black crew cut and gang tattoos covering his arms and hands. But when he speaks--about his victims, his neglected teenage daughter, his wife whom he hooked on heroin and who later died of AIDS--his voice is soft and he chokes up.

“I’ve been shot twice, stabbed four times, run over,” Vicuna says, swiping his eyes with a thick forearm. “I shouldn’t even be here, but here I am. For some reason I got a second chance.”

Vicuna now lives in downtown Los Angeles, in a Walden House center for ex-cons and parole violators. He washes dishes, helps with other chores and spends hours in group therapy. He hasn’t done drugs for 15 months.

A treatment program in prison got him started on the right road. He once viewed such options with disdain, figuring that they were “just for sissies.” But a counselor he trusted urged him on, and Vicuna found resurrection in the therapy.

“I started finding reasons for the way my life turned out. I started thinking maybe I could function without drugs,” he says. He regrets that he didn’t seek help earlier, but wonders whether his “bad attitude about life” might have made him unreceptive until now.

Vicuna realizes staying clean won’t be easy, but the pressure at Walden House is acute. If “you mess up, you have to stand up before the group, explain what you did, accept the guilt.”

For now, he’s putting one foot in front of the other, and celebrating victories along the way. “Today,” he said recently, “I will see my parole officer. And for the first time ever, I’ll be clean.”