Alternative Sentencing
Drug Rehabilitation, Not Incarceration
Studies have shown that states' efforts to rehabillitate drug criminals are effective in reducing recidivism and the costs of incarceration. However, all too frequently, such programs are dismissed as being "soft on crime" or, if implemented, are underfunded and ignored by legislators.
California's Substance Abuse and Crime Prevention Act (SACPA), the state's largest "treatment-not-jail program," allows offenders on probation or parole who commit nonviolent, drug-related offenses or who violate drug-related conditions of their release to receive drug treatment instead of returning to prison. A 2006 UCLA School of Medicine study compared the cost differences between SACPA-eligible offenders with a similar group of drug offenders who were ineligible for SACPA treatment because their crimes occurred before SACPA was enacted. The study showed that SACPA saves taxpayers nearly $2.50 for every $1 invested in the program. Tragically, due to that state's ongoing budget crisis, SACPA's funding has been cut by 83%, crippling its utility.
Electronic Monitoring
"Home confinement" is a more cost-effective and rehabilitative incarceratory method than the use of prison. With the help of modern advances in GPS technology, electronic monitoring can enable states to more reliabily and effectively prevent recidivism.
Electronic monitoring is considered to be more effective in preventing recidivism than prison sentences because it imposes behavior-modification in the offender's natural environment rather than in a government institution. Electronic monitoring allows offenders to learn how to act acceptably in the real world rather than in the unreal world of prisons.1 Home confinement simultaneously affirms the offender's place and identity within the community while causing shame for having committed the crime.
Importantly, home detention is much less expensive than prison. While the average daily cost per prisoner of electronically-monitored home confinement is $17.95, the cost of federal incarceration is $64.32 per prisoner per day.1
New forms of electronic monitoring would allow state officials to surgically implant a GPS transponder into the arm of a convicted criminal; a satellite would monitor his movement, and the transponder would alert the police if the criminal left the allowed areas, such as his home or workplace, or if the criminal violated a "curfew" by failing to return home by a certain time.
Such electronic monitoring is unquestionably unorthodox, but its proven cost-effectiveness and capacity to effectively rehabilitate offenders in their home environment make it an important (and underutilized) option in the fight against crime.
