The Defeat of Prop 5: California
The Defeat of Prop 5: California
The defeat of Proposition 5, in California, was a major blow to the entire area of Drug Addiction Rehabilitation. Whether they know it or not it was also a disastrous outcome for the people of California. It was nothing more than a rude awakening to the destructive power of a Union gone astray from the Society it serves. The California Correctional Peace Officers Association (Union) in California is the largest, wealthiest, most powerful lobby group in the State. Corrections is a cottage industry in the California economy. The CCPOA includes prison Corrections Officers and Parole Agents, and it numbers 30,000 or more members. These are well paid, highly compensated in benefits, and like minded people. They lobby against the professional drug treatment field, constantly. California has implemented Substance Abuse Programs or SAP’s into literally every prison in the State. Some sources say there are 33 prisons, some say 36, but regardless the number changes regularly because they build prisons, not colleges in California. There are in fact, more State Prisons than State Colleges, and these are not small endeavors. Several California prisons have more than 6,000 inmates. For example, San Quentin is one with over 6,000 inmates and it employs over 900 correctional officers and over 600 other staff. This is really big business. And by establishing these so-called “treatment programs” in every prison, they are now integral in the number of employees needed. This at the same time makes the CCPOA bigger and stronger. They have exceptional legal counsel and feed lots of dollars into HMO’s, local economies, and lobbying in Sacramento, the State Capitol. This is POWER! The frightening problem is their power to keep the SAP’s in business. Well, you might ask, why is that a problem? It’s simple! The SAP programs don’t work.
A report released Feb. 21, 2007, by the State of California, Office of the Inspector General, states emphatically, in bold print in the header, “The state’s substance abuse treatment programs for inmates do not reduce recidivism, yet cost the state 3 million per year.” In other words, as I previously stated, they don’t work. The following is a quote from that same study:
“Effective treatment for substance abuse offers one of the state’s best hopes of reducing the number of inmates who repeatedly cycle in and out of prisons,” said Inspector General Matthew
Cate. “Successful treatment programs could reduce the cost to society of criminal activity related
to drug abuse, change lives, and help relieve the state’s prison overcrowding crisis. But so far the
Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation has squandered that opportunity,” Cate said.
The report goes even further in announcing that “One five-year University of California, Los Angeles, study of the state’s two largest in-prison programs found, in fact, that the 12-month recidivism rates for inmates who received in-prison treatment was slightly higher than that of a control group.”
Another recent study by the University of California estimated that 42 percent of California inmates have a “high need” for alcohol treatment and 56 percent have a high need for drug treatment, and recidivism rates for California inmates in general continue to be among the highest in the country.
Yet another recent study showed that inmates who received in-prison treatment followed by at least “90 days of community-based aftercare” did have significantly lower recidivism rates than non-participants. This begs us to question why are we not sending these addicts and alcoholics straight to the Community Based Providers? This is what Proposition 5 of 2008 was designed to do. The facts I have just given did not make it into the public arena, in support of Prop 5. The supporters did not have the funds or I’m guessing the resources to get detailed info to the Voters! (You can find this document by doing an online search for the Office of the Inspector General, California, Government and looking for the Study released Feb. 21, 2007.)
But, the CCPOA accompanied by MADD (who I had supported prior to this year) did have the money to bombard the people with a systematic ration of disinformation. They convincingly made it sound like this proposition was going to “en mass” just release the Meth and Crack onto the streets and into the communities of California. Proposition 5 was in fact a proper, economically wise, safe solution to finding a way to fund the more effective community based “Treatment Providers” in the Substance Abuse Treatment field. As with the “deemed success”, Prop 36, violent offenders would have been excluded from participation, as well as people with felony “Sales” convictions. But the propaganda machine