On a recent afternoon in Multnomah County’s drug diversion court, a day after her release from temporary custody, Cristel Stanton stood before Judge Christopher Marshall fresh-faced and amiable.
“You look better today,” Marshall said. “Help me out — how did she look yesterday?”
“You looked like crap yesterday,” offered another drug court participant, watching from the jury box.
“I felt like crap yesterday,” Stanton admitted. A few minutes later, she entered a guilty plea to a felony charge of methamphetamine possession, and she officially entered the STOP drug court program.
“We’re going to take this one small step at a time,” Marshall told her.
If Stanton successfully graduates from the STOP program, which combines drug treatment with court supervision, the state will dismiss her felony charge. If that happens, she may avoid some of the obstacles facing hundreds of thousands of Americans whose involvement with drugs lands them in the hands of the criminal justice system.
Drug courts, of which Multnomah County’s is one of the oldest, represent one attempt to steer away from increasingly punitive drug laws that many critics say are ineffective at best and discriminatory at worst. (See page 4 of the PDF of the full April 18 issue for an interview with Judge Christopher Marshall.) By intervening early with a comprehensive treatment program, drug courts aim to break the cycle of punishment and reoffense that feeds a costly, ever-growing prison system.
The more than 342,000 people imprisoned for drug offenses constitute nearly a quarter of the nation’s prison population, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. Nearly half of the state prisoners locked up for drug crimes are black. And women in prison, a rapidly growing group, are more likely than men to be in on drug charges.
Oregon’s statistics tell of a different approach. Only about 7 percent of inmates in Oregon prisons are classified as drug offenders. However, as Department of Corrections officials point out, it is hard to say how many of the person and property crimes that send people to prison are motivated by drugs.
Most people convicted of drug crimes in Oregon are sentenced to probation rather than prison, and that’s good news, says Craig Prins, executive director of the state’s Criminal Justice Commission.
“We tend to only send to prison those who have either multiple dealing convictions or have a substantial quantity of drugs,” Prins said. Otherwise, “we think it’s very cost-effective to do community-based treatments.”
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The criminalization of drugs reflects a history of fear of particular demographic groups, explains Melissa Thompson, a sociologist at Portland State University who studies criminology and substance abuse.
In the early 1900s, drug laws were nonexistent. Opiates like heroin were used in cough remedies and as sedatives for children. Drug use only began to be prosecuted, Thompson says, when it was tied to minority groups.
“Opium became associated with Asians, and all of a sudden it became a demon drug,” Thompson says. “Marijuana became associated with Mexican-Americans, and all of a sudden marijuana is evil, it's bad, it does these horrible things.”
In the 1980s, crack cocaine became the demon drug. Congress has only now begun to reform a 20-year-old disparity in federal sentences for selling crack and powder cocaine. Under those laws, a person caught with 5 grams of crack received the same prison sentence as someone with 500 grams of powder cocaine. The only significant difference between the two forms of the drug is that crack is cheaper, Thompson said, and more often used in poor, urban black communities.
“As long as it’s the white middle class housewife that’s taking it, we don’t seem to have a problem,” Thompson says. “It’s just when it’s a person of color.”
Since the 1980s, as politicians on all sides have enacted three-strikes laws and mandatory minimum sentences in efforts to be tough on crime, the number of people incarcerated for drug offenses has increased by a factor of 11.
This November, voters will have the opportunity to vote on two new tough-on-crime intiatives that would create more mandatory sentencing for drug offenders.
Nicole Brown, the workforce development administrator, said that "Our department is really planning for one of those measures to pass... so there will probably be an influx of new inmates into our program needing treatment."
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The criminalization of drug users sets off a string of consequences for individuals, their families and their communities. Thompson and her colleagues liken felons and ex-felons to a caste — a group of people who carry a stigma that adversely affects their lives and is nearly impossible to shake.
A prior felony conviction can be a barrier to finding employment or housing. If a potential employer sees a drug conviction on a background check, Thompson says, “The perception is that you’re going to be stealing money out of the till.” Landlords may fear that drug offenders will be violent, or that they’ll manufacture drugs on the property.
Students convicted of possessing or selling drugs can lose federal student aid — and drug crimes are the only ones applicants for student aid are required to disclose.
In some states, convicted felons can never vote again, and in others they have to petition to restore their voting rights after they’ve filled their sentences. The Sentencing Project, a nonprofit research and advocacy group, estimates that 5.3 million Americans are currently or permanently disenfranchised — including 13 percent of the country’s black men.
In Oregon, anyone who isn’t in prison on Election Day can vote, so most drug offenders remain enfranchised — but even so, Thompson points out, politicians are unlikely to cater to the interests of the felon voting bloc.
Family and community repercussions can be just as devastating. The children of incarcerated parents — especially those whose mothers are imprisoned — can suffer emotional trauma and perform poorly in school. Studies have shown that children whose mothers are in prison are five times more likely than their peers to end up behind bars themselves.
Police efforts are often concentrated in poor and minority neighborhoods, Thompson said, and as a result, “There are entire neighborhoods that just completely have no young men of color anymore.” The only role models left for young boys in those neighborhoods are older men — many of whom have already been in prison — and a few drug dealers who haven’t been arrested.
“Sending people to prison and taking them out of their community, taking them away from their neighborhood, taking them away from their schooling, (and) taking them away from their jobs,” Thompson said, is “pretty much guaranteeing that when they get out, they're not going to be better people.”
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Even though most of Oregon’s prisoners aren’t in for drug crimes, about three-quarters of them — more than 10,000 have problems with substance abuse problems. Only a small fraction of those receive addiction treatment in prison. The availability of rehab in prison is limited by funding, but also by “architecture,” said Nicole Brown, who administrates the DOC’s workforce development program.
Substance abuse treatment, which in Oregon prisons focuses on cognitive behavioral therapy, is most effective in small community settings, Brown said, so treatment facilities tend to hold around 50 beds. But it’s more cost-effective to build prisons in much larger wards, so treatment spaces are often left out.
Treatment beds go to prisoners who are nearing release and considered likely to reoffend if they don’t get substance treatment — often those incarcerated for crimes such as forgery and theft, Brown said.
According to Prins at the Criminal Justice Commission, the treatment beds at Oregon’s newest prison in Madras were the first the DOC has built since 7,000 new beds ago. There are 429 treatment beds in Oregon state prisons, 50 of which are for women.
The DOC spends about $40 million of its $1.3 billion budget on in-prison treatment and education, Prins said. “They recognize that it’s a need,” he said, “but there’s only so much money.”
