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August 24, 2015

Spotlighting disparities in who gets drug treatment in prison

This notable new Pacific Standard article shines a spotlight on yet another arena in which race and other personal factors may impact the operation of our modern criminal justice system.  The piece is headlined "Who Does, and Who Doesn’t, Get Drug Treatment in Prison: New research finds a racial disparity," and here are excerpts (with a few key links preserved):

Research has consistently shown how important it is for inmates who come into prison with drug addictions to get treatment behind bars: Drug use in prison that involves needles can spread disease, and cold-turkey withdrawals can lead to overdoses when people get out. But new research also shows that, even when drug treatment is available to prison inmates, not everyone actually takes advantage of it.  In fact, the disparity between who does and does not seek treatment often falls among racial lines.

For her recent article in the journal Addictive Behaviors, University of Colorado–Boulder sociologist Kathryn Nowotny looked at survey information gathered in 2004 from state prisons across the country — over 5,000 inmates in 286 prisons.  She found that fewer than a half of the inmates who had drug dependency problems had received any kind of treatment at all in their time behind bars.  Of those who had, the most commonly referenced treatment was “self-help groups” (as opposed to, say, opioid replacement therapy).  And she also found that, when treatment was available, Hispanic inmates who had drug dependency were much less likely than either white or black inmates to utilize it. But why?

Nowotny wrote that she was motivated to examine the racial disparities in drug treatment program use in prisons because there was a dearth of research on this topic.  But many other researchers have previously found the same patterns in drug treatment programs out in the communities as well.  She notes that — in addition to the widely held consensus viewpoint that people of color have disproportionate contact with every stage of the criminal justice system in America — programs that divert first-time drug offenders out of prison and into alternative treatment have often been shown to favor those defendants “with economic and social resources.”  But the disparity she found in treatment during prison sentences was apparent, even when she accounted for all of the other possible factors, like age, gender, marital status, socioeconomic factors, mental health, and criminal history.

In looking for reasons for the disparity, she points to another finding — that white inmates with drug dependency issues are more likely than Hispanic ones to have in-prison drug treatment mandated as part of their sentences. There could also be a much simpler reason for the difference in drug treatment participation. “It is also possibly that language barriers and other indicators of acculturation account for this disparity especially considering that one in five Latinos in prison are foreign born,” she adds. “This hypothesis is bolstered by the fact that no black-white disparities were found.”

A similar study, published in 2013 in the International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology, looked not at state prison inmates but at people being held in county jails that offered drug treatment programs. But the researchers in that study did not find that the differences broke down on more personal lines. They did not find a disparity between jail inmates of different races or ethnicities; here, it was more an issue of age and individual outlook. Younger people were less likely to seek treatment. Men were less likely than women to accept this kind of help. So were people who said they doubted whether they had the discipline or the time to make it stick.

August 24, 2015 at 08:54 AM | Permalink

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