By Richard A. Webster
The Journal of Jefferson Parish
La.’'s incarceration rate leads nation
JEFFERSON PARISH, La. — Jefferson Parish locks up drug users at a higher rate than all but six counties in the United States, and that’'s not a good thing, experts say.
The Justice Policy Institute released a report on the impact of drug imprisonment Dec. 5. The study found Jefferson Parish had a drug incarceration rate of 186 per 100,000 people in 2002, ranking it seventh out of 198 counties or parishes with populations greater than 250,000.
Orleans Parish had a rate of 249, which was good for third place.
Kern County in California had the highest rate at 320 while Mecklenburg County in North Carolina had the lowest at 2.57.
Jefferson Parish Sheriff Newell Norman said the high incarceration rate is not an indication Jefferson Parish is winning the war against drugs but evidence the state is in desperate need of alternative ways to deal with first-time non-violent drug offenders.
“We’'re not going to arrest our way out of this problem,” Norman said. “There needs to be alternatives out there. You still have to be aggressive with the criminal population but there is a percentage that can be rehabilitated if they had adequate support systems. “
Of the 3,015 people Jefferson Parish officers arrested in 2006 for drug offenses, roughly 50 percent were first-time offenders, Norman said.
Jefferson Parish’'s drug court mandates supervised treatment as opposed to incarceration but it only has a capacity of 200. Norman said they need to increase that to at least 2,000 but the money is simply not there.
“It will take significant financing to deal with this but the most expensive way to deal with first-time drug offenders is by putting everybody in jail,” he said. “And if you don’'t deal with the addictive disorder you’'re going to have high rates of recidivism. “
It costs between $18,000 and $26,000 to keep someone in jail for a year compared with $1,800 to $4,700 for a year of treatment, according to the American Correctional Association.
Treatment capacity full
Ed Carlson, executive director of Odyssey House Louisiana, a substance abuse treatment center, said drug services are severly lacking throughout the New Orleans region. Even if law enforcement wanted to admit nonviolent drug offenders into treatment, there is nowhere to put them.
The New Orleans region needs 2,000 treatment beds to deal with demand but only has 200, Carlson said. It needs at least 50 detox beds but has just 20. It also needs 10,000 outpatient slots, with a current inventory of 300.
Rafael Goyeneche, president of the New Orleans Metropolitan Crime Commission, said courts need to aggressively mandate treatment when drug offenders come through their courtrooms. Unfortunately, the lack of services doesn’'t give them that luxury.
“If we’'re going to get smart about public safety and reducing crime I think Sheriff Norman is absolutely correct that we need more treatment centers,” Goyeneche said. “We put these people in jail or on probation which means they aren’'t getting help. We put them back on the streets in the same environment that begot their criminal conduct in the first place and they probably went right back out dealing drugs to support their own addiction problems.
“There are people who have to be sentenced to jail and others who require more help than probation and if we want to break the crime cycle and fill the area of need between probation and incarceration and that means drug treatment for some of the criminal population. “
More than 80 percent of the 100,000 people processed at Orleans Parish Prison before Hurricane Katrina tested positive for drugs, Goyeneche said.
In a recent report on the Orleans Parish Criminal District Court, the MCC found during the first two quarters of 2007, the percentage of people incarcerated after an arrest for drug possession increased from 24 percent pre-storm, or 6,690 inmates, to 37 percent, or 10,730, and from 32 percent, or 9,280, to 62 percent, or 17,980, for drug distribution.
Capt. Ralph Dunn, commander of jail management for Jefferson Parish, said by attacking the low-level criminals they hope to prevent those individuals from committing more serious offenses in the future. But there are few cells left in the jail to put non-violent drug offenders.
Jail space limited
Before the storm, Jefferson Parish Prison had a capacity of 1,100 but because of a lack of guards, it has fallen to 850. Because of overcrowding, nonviolent drug offenders are often the first released back onto the streets, said Dunn.
Jefferson Parish Prison has 250 guards and is trying to hire 150 more.
Jason Ziedenberg, executive director of the Justice Policy Institute and co-author of the report, said high incarceration rates do not lead to decreased drug use. Jefferson Parish and Macomb Country in Michigan are on the opposite ends of the spectrum when it comes to drug incarceration rates - 186 and 22.51, respectively. But the percentage of their populations that use drugs are nearly identical - 8.47 compared with 8.59.
The big factors that play into why some counties incarcerate low-level drug offenders more than others are poverty, race and availability of drug treatment, Ziedenberg said.
The drug imprisonment rate in the counties with the highest poverty rates is 106 compared with a rate of 27 in the counties with the lowest poverty rates.
African-Americans are jailed for drug offenses in high-poverty communities at three times the rate of whites in low-poverty counties.
Ziedenberg said this has a lot to do with the nature of drug dealing in these economically disparate communities.
“In most metropolitan areas there are open air drug markets which are fairly easy to spot by the naked eye by law enforcement,” he said. “It’'s different from the drug trade in the suburbs or college dorm rooms. We’'re sending police to certain neighborhoods where they’'re more likely to witness open air markets and we’'re not sending police into other parts of the community the same way. If you want to deal with the drug problem at a major university you would have to have a completely different strategy. “
Race also plays a major factor in the rate of drug incarcerations. The report found 14 million white Americans used drugs in 2002 in the previous month compared with 2.6 million African-Americans. In other words five times as many whites used drugs as blacks but blacks are admitted to prison for drug offenses at nearly 10 times the rate of whites.
In 2002, 24 percent of crack cocaine users were African-American and 72 percent were white or Hispanic, yet more than 80 percent of defendants sentenced for crack cocaine offenses were African American.
Ziedenberg said this disparity can be explained the same way as the economic disparity - the enforcement of drug laws is more aggressive in urban areas that tend to be poorer and largely populated by African-Americans.
Crack use climbs post-K
Norman said following the hurricane, unemployment has increased and that has led to greater use of narcotics. The most prevalent in Jefferson Parish is crack cocaine. Heroin has made a slight comeback and its potency compared with drug from the 1970s has increased from 17 percent pure to 70 percent.
The problem is getting worse and the addictions more crippling but without alternatives to incarceration, he said, his hands are tied.
“We’'re advocates of alternatives, but there are no systematic alternatives to incarceration throughout the state for first-time drug offenders who really need rehabilitation,” Norman said. “But I believe that more and more people are coming to realize that we have to deal with this problem with a holistic approach. Bottom line - the state needs to have a lot more medical detox facilities available and I think we’'ll see that in the future. "
Copyright 2007 Dolan Media Newswires