In the world of drugs and addiction, which is mostly insane, there has recently been a sane admonition, “the madness has to stop.”  So says the wife of  Pennsylvania Governor Christie, Mary Pat Christie.  What madness is she talking about?  The madness of drug related arrest, recividism, re-arrest, and on and on.  This cycle costs a lot of money and the governor and his wife have a brilliant, but not entirely original idea – how about getting these guys some treatment?  Here is an article about the matter.:

“Gov. Chris Christie has signaled he may use some of his considerable leverage on an issue that has long bedeviled politicians, devastated budgets and undone countless lives: the nexus of crime and drug addiction.

In a recent interview, the governor cited both the human and economic benefits of providing treatment for people whose drug use was at the root of their criminal actions. “Anything we can do to reclaim lives that can be lost to drug abuse and prison would be a great thing to do on a humanitarian level,” he said. “Secondly, it’s certainly an economic factor. If we can turn these people from being economic drains into productive citizens, it’s great for the economy.”

Should the governor decide to pursue policies to foster re-entry for nonviolent offenders, he will have a strong ally – his wife, Mary Pat Christie. It was the degree of recidivism that leaves so many lives at a dead end that drew her to the issue. The state’s first lady captured the legacy of so-called tough-on-crime policies: an endless cycle of drug use, crime arrest, imprisonment, release, repeat ad nauseam: “This re-entry thing is what grabbed me because the rate of recidivism was terrible. The fact that these kids – now adults, really – are going right back into a prison population – the madness has to stop.”

Madness is an apt word, calling to mind as it does the definition of insanity as doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Her description of what the system has produced reveals an awful truth: Many who have been incarcerated under harsh sentencing policies were little more than children when they had their first encounter with law enforcement and saw their youth devoured in prison. And with a prison record and their drug use having gone unaddressed, many of those released from prison stand a strong change of returning there. Data show the percentage of inmates whose crimes were related to drug use is 81 percent. Furthermore, 60 percent of inmates are rearrested within three years of their release, and half are reincarcerated, each at a cost of just under $50,000 a year.”

Source

And as Pennsylvania is looking at treatment modalities, they should have a look at Narconon drug and alcohol treatment.

Narconon drug rehab started in a prison and though it is mostly in residential settings now, we have helped many escape the endless mouse wheel of drugs and incarceration.

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