I am an enrolled member of the Cherokee tribe of Eastern Oklahoma. I am in recovery from alcoholism, opioid addiction, mental health, poverty, childhood domestic violence, prison, trauma colonization and the patriarchy. I’m serving my third year as Oregon State Correctional Institution’s, or OSCI, Native American Inmate Club President. I am a certified recovery mentor and a certified alcohol and drug counselor. I am receiving supervision to qualify as a certified gambling addiction counselor and a qualified mental health associate. In less than one year, I will be in the free community with you.
In February 2015, I caused the death of an innocent person in a drunken-driving crash. I was convicted of first-degree manslaughter, felony Driving under the influence, reckless driving and reckless endangerment. After this horrible decision, I promised myself that I would never drink again and would dedicate my life to preventing addiction-related deaths. Understanding that what I have done can never be undone, this is how I honor my victim’s life. My crimes are especially heinous because help for me had always been available, yet I never asked for it. Working to prevent more addiction-related deaths is how I’ve served nine years of a 10-year and three-month sentence.
Prison is the frozen concentrate version of the free world’s juice. It has all the same personalities, beliefs and behaviors, but it is potent and overwhelming to the senses. The people here have acted extremely enough to have lost control and drawn the attention of the criminal justice system. And if rehabilitative programming is the water that can dilute addicts and criminals into pro-social, healthy people, the Oregon Department of Corrections, or ODOC, is a desert.
A prison is a place where people with the worst substance use and mental health problems end up. When I entered ODOC, I was first housed at the Coffee Creek Intake Center, where I answered screening questionnaires to assess my potential for recidivism and my mental health and substance abuse needs.
ODOC ostensibly uses the risk-needs-responsivity theory that says services should be targeted at offenders with the highest risk of recidivism, and treatment should focus on their specific criminal risk. According to this logic, there should be drug treatment for people with a substance use disorder, therapy for those with mental health disorders, and group counseling for those with high criminal values and personalities. Yet, in reality, this is not how ODOC works.
The criminogenic factor
As a result of the war on drugs and resultant mandatory minimum sentencing laws passed during the 1990s, money for behavioral services to treat mental health disorders and substance abuse was diverted into building more prisons and further criminalizing disease. Before Oregon adopted its mandatory minimum sentencing law, Measure 11, in 1995, ODOC had fewer than 8,000 people in custody. Since Measure 11, Oregon’s inmate population increased to 12,000 people, and has been above 14,000 people at times. The longer sentences doled out by courts have led to Oregon housing one of the oldest inmate populations in America.
“Prison is the frozen concentrate version of the free world’s juice. It has all the same personalities, beliefs and behaviors, but it is potent and overwhelming to the senses. And if rehabilitative programming is the water that can dilute addicts and criminals into pro-social, healthy people, the Oregon Department of Corrections is a desert.”
The Secretary of State’s 2013 audit, “Department of Corrections: Treatment of the Highest-risk Offenders Can Avoid Costs,” reported, as of December 2012, that ODOC was holding 14,240 felony offenders, roughly 70% with some level of substance abuse problem. If Oregonians want to address crime, we will have to prioritize alcohol and drug treatment and mental health interventions. The physiological processes at play when people with an addiction use drugs are similar to those occurring when criminals break the law. For individuals who live at the intersection of criminal thinking and addictive thinking, the two exacerbate each other. Add to these factors the fact that half of all people diagnosed with substance use disorders are also diagnosed with co-occurring mental health disorders, and the need for treatment becomes overwhelmingly urgent.
The January 2023 Oregon Secretary of State audit “Too Early to Tell: The Challenging Implementation of Measure 110 Has Increased Risks, but the Effectiveness of the Program Has Yet to Be Determined” illustrates ODOC’s rehabilitative programming desert. Only about 4% of those needing treatment in ODOC custody were offered substance use disorder treatment, according to the report.
This means that Oregon’s single most significant criminogenic factor may be addiction. It also means that, to our best accounting, only a small number of people in prison with highly treatable addictions will receive an intervention to address them.
‘The surface of Mars’
I arrived at Snake River Correctional Institution in Ontario, Oregon, in November 2015, my first prison after the intake process. I was housed in Complex 3, Unit D. I felt alone and scared, eight hours away from my home and anyone who cared for me, in a different time zone. All I could see from the windows was red sandy dirt and more prison buildings beyond the chain link fence. I thought, “This could be the surface of Mars.”
It looked hopeless, but I did not lose hope. My previous supervisor visited me in the county jail, and she assured me, “One of the members of the Woodworkers Guild is a (Department of Corrections) officer, and he says there are programs in every prison you can participate in to work on yourself. Please use them.”
Unfortunately, the rehabilitative program offerings were as stark as the view outside. It took five months to get into Alcoholics Anonymous, or AA, even though it was poorly attended, a result of apathetic administrators who mismanaged program assignments. Due to the length of my sentence and the fact that I was sentenced under Oregon’s mandatory minimum law, I would need to wait nine years and nine months before I would be offered any structured programming for my mental health or addictions.
Inmates are not offered alcohol or drug treatment until the last six to seven months of their sentence. This means prisoners with life sentences are never offered treatment, even though their crimes mainly result from substance use. It also maintains a more highly addictive population. One of the primary challenges in drug treatment is getting users into it during the fleeting windows when they want help.
In my current institution, OSCI prisoners seeking recovery services can sign up for AA, Narotics Anonymous and Spanish AA with limited capacity. In a prison that houses nearly 900 inmates, the available spots are too few to meet the need. Our AA volunteers offered to facilitate a second weekly meeting. OSCI’s administration denied the request. One week after the denial, the newly appointed ODOC director appeared on a local broadcast touting his decision to spend tens of thousands in taxpayer dollars to train dogs and test prison sewage for drugs.
Substance use disorders are measurable, observable and highly treatable medical diseases. Social stigma has bred ignorance of this fact. In many cases, a little education, guided questioning and support is enough to motivate people with substance use disorders to change their lives.
Prisons make addiction worse
I watch the local news in my cell at night, seeking images of the city I love and will return to. Recently, I saw reports of decreases in Portland’s crime rate. Even though they were not explicitly defined as drug-related, I know that addiction issues overwhelmingly cause violence, thefts, burglaries, murders and break-ins. Oregon’s Measure 110 profoundly supported the culture of recovery in Oregon, especially in Portland. I wonder how much of this investment in recovery-oriented care systems has impacted the decrease in crime.
I am one of six prisoners working in a treatment program allowing me to benefit from treatment and become a trained and employable recovery professional. In the condition of mass incarceration, I won the lottery. Almost no one else in prison will have the opportunity to heal and change as I have. I’m no more capable or deserving of the impossibly rare opportunity I have received than any other prisoner in ODOC. We need more recovery programs in prison. People in prison should be viewed as a high-need rather than high-risk population.
The absurdity of how drug use is handled in prison is evident. If a person is caught using drugs or fails a urine test, they’re put in the disciplinary segregation unit, commonly referred to as “the hole.” When you go to the hole, you lose your cell, cellmate, work assignment and access to rehabilitative services and regular visitations for a year. Prisoners also receive a monetary fine, often amounting to more than they will earn in four months.
If the hole worked to stop substance use, there would be no drugs or alcohol in prisons. As currently operated, prisons make addiction worse.
We need treatment programs available to all prisoners in every prison. We need to start fostering accountability in the system. We need an educated and involved citizenry advocating for prison accountability and rehabilitation. We need you to reach out to your state senators and representatives and ask them to allocate funding specifically to support the staffing and operation of treatment programs. I’m asking for help.
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This article appears in October 30, 2024.