Indefensible cuts to drug treatment programs

Budget binds often squeeze government into questionable choices, but some options would seem to be so absurd as to be unthinkable. Not even a penny-pinching mayor would send firefighters home while a five-alarm blaze is raging. Florida wouldn’t close its emergency operations center in the face of a category four hurricane. Trauma centers are staffed 24 hours, not 18. No governor would shut down effective prison drug treatment programs amid a worsening opioid epidemic. Sorry, but that last example is real. Dozens of privately run substance abuse and offender re-entry programs that serve the Florida Department of Corrections have closed or are being shut down this week. Secretary Julie Jones ordered the $28-million budget cut to help fund renewal of the agency’s controversial prison health care contract with Centurion LLC. Earlier, she took a fiscal ax to prison libraries and chaplains. This is indefensible and intolerable. Reporting on the situation, the Miami Herald-Tampa Bay Times said the cuts are eliminating hundreds of jobs at 33 facilities and sending work release inmates back to conventional prisons to wait for release with little or no preparation.

When they do get out, said a program official at Kissimmee, they’ll “go back on the streets with $50 in their pockets and a bus pass. For an addict, that’s enough to get them back on the streets and into the cycle, and they’ll be back in prison.”

The programs being slashed have been notably successful in reducing recidivism.

“…I would have been lost, and who knows where I would be now,” a former inmate said in an email to the newspapers. “But I know my life would be very different.”

Some 22 percent of new inmates have been sentenced on drug charges, according to the department’s last annual report, but drug dependency motivates many others to commit the robberies, burglaries and thefts listed as their primary offenses. Officials have said that seven in 10 new inmates have substance abuse problems requiring medical attention. Even in prison, drugs are easy to obtain. Underpaid correctional workers are one source.

Professional treatment is a necessity, not a luxury.

“One of the more recent substance abuse problems plaguing Florida institutions is the use of synthetic cannabinoids, cathinones (bath salts) and opiates, also known as KW or Spice and Fentanyl,” said the department’s annual report for the fiscal year 2016-17.

In that light, what’s happening is a monumental disgrace for Gov. Rick Scott, who oversees Jones and the state prisons, as well as for the legislative leaders who could have provided the money.

Florida governors have the means to manage budget emergencies and this is a relatively small instance. Plus, there’s a lot more money coming in, which explains why the $89 billion state budget that starts July 1 is up $6 billion over this year’s budget.

The newspaper report attributed the failure to House leaders as well as to Scott. A spokeswoman for the Senate said its leaders were interested in a solution, but there was no agreement by a deadline that had been set for last Friday.

The report also said the program closures serve a long-term goal of Jones to shut down the nonprofit operations and replace them with programs managed by the department itself, which she said would be more cost-efficient. However, no concrete plans exist. Jones would not comment for the article, but had said earlier she had hoped the cuts would be temporary.

Two years ago, however, she tried to shut down two locations, in Pompano Beach and Bradenton, but relented in response to protests. At the time, she said 60 percent of the department’s in-prison substance treatment budget was spent on inmates least likely to re-offend.

But that begged the question of how much more likely their return to prison would be without the prevention programs. For a state government operated on the principles of common sense, rather than expediency, the answer would be simple: Keep those programs and add more for the inmates at higher risk of recidivism.

This particular instance of false economy is but one aspect of a prison system in a constant state of crisis because of chronic underfunding, overcrowding and neglect. Exhausted guards forced to work overtime with not enough colleagues to watch their back is a formula guaranteed, in the short term, to result in violence and in the long run to disaster.

Scott, whose concept of prison reform seems to be limited to privatization, leaves an enormous problem to the next governor and whoever he or she chooses to succeed Jones. Voters should hold all the candidates accountable for details, not just platitudes, on how to defuse this time bomb.