How we treat prisoners and addicts may be wrong

Addiction Economy Thought for Today - following on from yesterday's post on the implications of seeming to view poverty as a 'moral problem' “People deserve to be where they are, it’s their own fault they are poor/fat/drunk, they are just spongers off the state’ with shocking results. Ditto here with Addiction.

Stephen Bush getting FT readers in a pickle here with the rather clickbait headline. But his underlying point about how we treat individuals who are unable to control their use of certain products and non-violent crime is sound:

"For instance: 48 per cent of women prisoners report committing an offence to support someone else’s drug addiction, and as many as a quarter of them arrive at prison with some form of addiction problem, whether to legal or illegal drugs.

Given that treating drug addiction in a prison cell for months, not years, is at least 20 times more expensive than doing so via a short stay in a hospital bed, it is, I would say, not obvious that either the taxpayer or the war on drugs is best served by criminal sanctions for drug users of either sex.

One of the simplest ways to spend less money, both on prisons and in general, is to treat drug addiction as a medical problem, rather than a criminal one. This approach is impossible to reconcile, however, with Labour’s commitment to not only continue a prohibitionist approach to many drugs but actively expanding the number of prohibited substances, thanks to their proposed plans to gradually outlaw cigarettes over time.

The case of women prisoners should, above all, make us ask “what are we trying to accomplish through incarceration?” It is not obvious that prison is ever going to be a good solution to drug addiction or for women who have been abused by their partners and coerced into crime.

While freeing most of the UK’s incarcerated women wouldn’t in and of itself fix the prison crisis, changing the laws and sentencing guidelines that send most of them to prison certainly would".

His point about cigarettes and criminalisation is interesting and for another day!