Pubdate: Wed, 18 Oct 2000 Source: San Francisco Daily Journal (CA) Contact: 1145 Market St. 8th Floor San Francisco CA 94103 Fax: (415) 252-0288 Website: http://www.dailyjournal.com/ Author: Ed Kimble, Daily Journal Staff Writer REPORT PRAISES HALLINAN'S PUSH FOR DRUG TREATMENT, NOT PRISON The Study Finds No Correlation Between The Rates Of Imprisonment And Of Reductions In Crime. Los Angeles and Orange county residents are imprisoned for low level drug possession at nearly five times the rate of San Francisco Bay Area counties, but with "no discernible impact on crime rates," the Justice Policy Institute has reported in its first ever county-by-county analysis of California drug policy enforcement. Of the state's 12 most populous counties, Los Angeles recorded the largest increase in imprisonment for drug possession between 1980 to 1999, the JPI report says, and together with Riverside, San Bernardino and Orange counties, ranked at the top of the list for county drug imprisonment rates. "The recent large increases in imprisonment for drug offenses show no discernible impact on crime rates. Rather, the pattern is a random one, with most high-incarceration counties showing no reduction in violent or property crime categories relative to low incarceration counties," the report says. The report, titled "Drug Use and Justice: An Examination of California Drug Policy Enforcement" adds that "the six counties that increased their imprisonment rates the most for low-level drug possession actually experienced greater increases in violent crime rates from 1980 to 1999 (up 11 percent on average) than the six most lenient counties (up 1 percent)." In San Francisco, where District Attorney Terence Hallinan has focused on prosecuting manufacturers and traffickers rather than low-level possessors, violent crime showed the greatest decrease in the state. "The fact that San Francisco has minimized severe penalties for drug possession and at the same time has seeing the sharpest drop in violent crimes shows that our policy makes sense in terms of public safety," Hallinan said. Debra Vargas, policy analyst for JPI, said in a telephone interview, that under Hallinan, San Francisco has "emphasized treatment over incarceration. Southern California does not." Vargas said San Francisco's jail programs, including a drug diversion program called Roads to Recovery, and the availability of halfway houses for those who complete drug treatment programs in jail, have lowered the recidivism rate for that population of offenders by 17 percent. "It works," Vargas said. Vargas noted that the average cost of drug treatment in California is $4,500 a year, while the cost of imprisoning one inmate in a California state prison is $26,000 a year. Overall, the report says, California's drug-offender population increased from 1,778 in 1980 to 45,455 in 1999, about 2.5 times what it is in the rest of the country. "Since 1990, many counties placed increased emphasis on the prosecution and imprisonment of low level drug offenders, especially for drug possession offenses," the reports says. "For example, in 1980, only seven people from San Diego County were sentenced to prison for low-level drug possession, while in 1999 the county sent 1,002 drug possession offenders to state prison. Los Angeles sentenced only 145 drug possession offenders to prison in 1980, yet sentenced 5,109 in 1999." The report notes that last year, 6,191 people with no prior offenses were imprisoned for possessing small amounts of drugs, accounting for 11 percent of those sent to state prisons in 1999. "In a radical departure from past drug enforcement, more Californians were imprisoned in the last three years for simple drug possession (38,716) than for sale or manufacturing drug offenses (35,276). Even more surprising, while a drug dealer or manufacturer was much more likely to be imprisoned than a drug possession offender in the 1980s and before, today an offender arrested for low-level drug possession is considerably more likely to be imprisoned than one arrested for felony drug manufacture or sale." While the JPI study focuses on drug imprisonment rates and their correlation to crime reduction, it is consistent in its findings, with broader studies showing that little if any of the nationwide drop in crime in the 1990s can be credited to higher incarceration rates. In a soon to be released Cambridge University Press book, "The Crime Drop in America," a group of academic experts reports that "no single factor can be invoked as the cause of the crime decline of the 1990s." A study released in late September by the Sentencing Project, a research and advocacy group in Washington, D.C., found that states that had increased the number of prison inmates the most in the 1990s actually had smaller reductions in crime than those with lower increases in imprisonment. A similar study by Anne Piehl, an associate professor of public policy at Harvard University, found that the incarceration increases from 1989 to 1999 accounted for only a 5 percent drop in overall violent and property crime. Carlisle Moody, a professor of economics at the College of William and Mary, criticized his fellow academics' estimates of the effects of imprisonment increases because the rate of incarceration, he said, has only recently begun to catch up with the sharp increase in crime that followed the mid-1960s. "I'm pretty sure these other people are underestimating the effects of incarceration on crime, because they are ignoring the historical changes," Moody is quoted in a recent New York Times article. "Prison has a much greater effect on crime than anything else, like employment or policing." - --- MAP posted-by: Terry Liittschwager