Drug Court Problems

Sharon’s drug addiction emerged at the age of 22. She started drinking alcohol at parties, not imagining its future consequences. Drugs replaced the alcohol and she began smoking marijuana. She believed it of little harm to her because she did not consider it a “hard” drug like cocaine or morphine. Fueled by her personal and family problems, Sharon’s abuse of crack cocaine then began. To fund her drug addiction, she worked as a prostitute and a hustler for drug dealers, but started selling drugs herself to make a larger profit. Police arrested her and sent her to jail, but Sharon returned to her old life immediately after her release., Sharon unknowingly sold to undercover police officers in January of 2010, who sent her to prison once more.

Statistics show the number of inmates serving time in the United States for drug crimes at forty-eight percent. This equates to over half a million people in jail for drug related offenses (Mann 37). Drug courts keep drug addicts and abusers out of prison. Margaret Dooley-Sammuli and Nastassia Walsh define drug courts as “programs that seek to reduce drug use through mandated drug treatment and close judicial oversight” (135). The drug court system places people in facilities similar to halfway houses for at least one year. Here they stay sober due to random drug testing, and appear before a judge who tracks and monitors the person’s progress (Huseman 140). Every person convicted of non-violent drug crimes deserves drug courts as a viable prison alternative because these programs reduce cost and show higher rates of

. . [c]laims that drug courts have significantly reduced costs . . . are unsupported by the evidence” (137). Although drug courts do cost more than probation alone, they cost much less than prison. A single inmate in prison for one year costs 24,000 dollars. After spending time in prison, the justice system places the inmate on parole, which costs roughly 1,200 dollars a year. A convict spending just one year in jail and one year on parole cost the American taxpayers a total of 25,200 dollars. Drug courts, however, cost about 3,000 dollars for the treatment, with a duration typically a year’s time (Huseman 143). The American Justice System would save an average of 22,000 dollars a year per prisoner by using drug courts instead of prisons and parole. Dooley-Sammuli and Walsh’s statement that drug courts have not “significantly reduced costs” has no basis in fact. The availability of many statistics that show the reduced cost to taxpayers prove that drug courts do reduce the financial burden on American