Why are we turning Prisoners into Drug Addicts?

We spend millions helping drug-dependent inmates – then send them to open prisons where narcotics are a way of life.

Twenty-six-year-old Shane Brown’s heroin addiction had cost him and his local community dear. In March 2004, after numerous thefts to feed the habit that he’d begun as a teenager, Brown*, from Manchester, robbed a corner shop. He was arrested and sentenced to three years in prison.

Housed in a secure wing at Forest Bank, a medium-security prison in Salford, Greater Manchester, Brown began to turn a corner. Segregated from other inmates and therefore unpressured by dealers among them, he underwent a rehabilitation programme ad started to come off drugs. He was ready to begin a more productive, crime-free life. But in April 2006 he was transferred to Kirkham open prison in Lancashire. In this more relaxed regime heroin use was rife and segregation non-existent. Brown found the pressure from dealers almost impossible to bear. “He pleaded not to be sent to an open prison and when he got there he informed a prison officer about his concerns, but nothing was done,” says his former barrister Phillip Martin.

The following month Brown decided the only answer was to commit yet another crime – abscond while on a visit to his family – in order to get back to a secure prison. “He told everyone he was going to walk out and walk he did,” says Martin.

He was duly sentenced to a further four months at Forest Bank. He has now been released, but his legal advisers do not know if he has finally conquered his addiction – or whether he has returned to crime.

Brown’s case is not unique. Criminal lawyer Simon Creighton has one client who has absconded five times to get away from the drugs in open prisons. One ex-prisoner reported inmates self harming or blockading themselves in their cells for the same reason.

These desperate manoeuvres are a consequence of the criminal justice system’s incoherent policy towards addicts. We now have a record 81,000 people in prison, more than six out of ten of them hardended drug users. Well over half of the total prison population will go back inside repeatedly after reoffending to feed their habit. To combat this problem, we spend £80 million annually on intensive drug-rehabilitation schemes for those in higher-security prisons then we destroy the benefit by transferring them to open institutions where drug use is endemic and rehab almost unheard of.

“Open prisons undo all the good done on drug-misuse programmes,” says Bobby Cummines, Chief executive of the ex-offenders’ charity Unlock and himself a former prisoner.

“They’re helping to fuel a drug war on our streets and we have beggars, muggings, cars and houses broken into, all to get money fro narcotics.”
Phillip Martin claims that the authorities are complicit and the like in open prisons. “They do little about it because a stoned population is a happy population. It makes prisoners easier to manage.” The authorities, of course, deny this, but according to Mike Trace, chief executive of the Rehabilitation of Addicted Prisoners Trust, what is certain is that drug screening and other security measures need to be stepped up.

But with the prison service told to make savings of £80 million a year on its running costs for the next three years, controls over access to illegal drugs will inevitably become harder to enforce – and rehabilitation programmes will be squeezed.

In Trace’s view, transferring prisoners with drug problem to open prison make no sense.
“Addicted offenders should only be transferred from higher-security prisons if they’ve completed rehab,” he says. Others would go further and have such offenders skip the open prison stage entirely. Most have served the majority of their sentence and it would be sensible to put many straight on to community punishment orders.
“These allow offenders freedom with strings attached,” says criminologist Roger Moore of Nottingham Trent University. “A requirement for regular drug testing can be inserted. They are cheaper than prison and more likely to be successful.”

Trace too would like to see more post-prison care so that vulnerable offenders are not thrown back into their old drug-using social circles without support and counselling. At present, prisoners over the age of 22 may get an “offender manager”, responsible for making sure they resist temptation, but only if they are sentenced to 12 months or more. Sentences for petty offender are usually too short for them to win a place on – far less complete – a rehabilitation scheme.

But solutions like these require a significant change in politicians’ attitudes. Egged on by the tabloid press, minister are anxious to have seemingly tough policies for drug offenders, rather than recognise that a greater emphasis on treatment can benefit both drug users and taxpayers.

One victim of such short- term thinking is the West Country charity C-Far, which provided residential rehabilitation programmes for young male offenders. C-Far reduced reoffending rates among its 120 participants to 40 percent against a national average of more than 80 percent for this age group.

Nonetheless, the Government withdrew most of its funding two years ago, suggesting that at £16,500 per trainee, C-Far was too expensive – overlooking the fact that, since it costs £37,000 a year to keep just one person in prison, C-Far had in fact saved the Government an estimated £16 million over four years of operation.

“Looking up addicted offenders and then releasing them without support  is just crisis management, with millions of taxpayers’ money being wasted,” says Trevor Philpott, founder and former chief executive of C-Far.
But without a major shift in government focus, Prison’s revolving door for drug-fuelled offenders is set to keep on spinning.

By Lois Roger, Reader’s Digest