Stop Jailing Drug Users

Far too many people are in American jails and prisons for nothing more than possessing illegal drugs for personal use. Drug use alone, without selling, should not be a crime. This needs to stop.

Recently, a twenty year old man was murdered in an Alabama prison—one day before his scheduled release. Evidence showed that he had been raped and tortured before being murdered. So far, no one has been indicted for the crime. He was sentenced to prison for one year for possessing an illegal drug. There was no evidence that he intended to sell any of it.

Drug use and especially addiction is an illness, not a crime. Users need treatment, not punishment.

What does this have to do with theology? As I argued in the immediately preceding post essay here, theology has to do with everything. And how we treat people in our criminal justice system is a matter of ethics and ethics depends on some vision of reality. Theology is reflection on the Christian view of reality.

The vast majority of drug users are vulnerable people. Sentencing them to rehabilitation is one thing; throwing them into a squalid, dangerous prison is something else.

Abuse of young men in American prisons is also a tragedy that needs to be addressed. Many of our prisons are privately operated, a real travesty. The owner-operators have no motivation to rehabilitate prisoners or get them out to become productive citizens of society.

When I lived in Texas (25 years), I discovered that there are people lost in the state prison system. One man was discovered in the county jail who had been there for a year without any representation. He was never actually sentenced to serve “time.” He was simply forgotten. The newspaper ran a story about him.

A local politician, former mayor, told me that he was trying to find a prisoner whose relatives knew he was in a state prison but did not know where. They asked him to help find him. I said “Well, surely there’s a central data base of all prisoners. Just look him up.” He said “No, there isn’t.”

The American penal system if due for radical reform. And one way is to release prisoners who are in prison merely for possessing illegal drugs with no evidence of intention to sell. The number of them is a travesty and injustice.

Let’s reform our American prison systems and start by freeing drug addicts.

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