Treatment or Punishment for Youth Drug Use - Research Proposal Example

Treatment or Punishment for Youth Drug Use Is Treatment or Punishment the More Appropriate Response to Youth Delinquency and Drug Use? In a Pew Research recent poll of Americans, the public appears to be giving in on the country’s war against drugs, as 67% responded by saying the government should focus more on providing treatment for those who use illegal drugs like heroin or cocaine; additionally, the two-thirds respondents outweigh the 26% who believe the government’s focus should be on prosecuting and punishing those criminal offenders (Doherty, Horowitz, & Suis, 2014). The results reflect shifting perceptions and concepts of drug usage, especially considering such views span all demographic groups. A number of states have reduced penalties such as mandatory sentencing for drug usage across all age groups of criminal offenders – both out of a response to calls from the public and the federal government to lessen punishments on such crimes as well as out of a pragmatism related to the overcrowding of jails (Savage, 2013). Increasingly, the views of science are weighing into the public debate on the role of punishment in response to drug crimes; among neurologists and psychologists, concepts are shifting toward drug abuse and addiction as a disease, similar to other mental illnesses – conditions for which individuals are no longer incarcerated in the United States (Stewart & Lurigio, 1999). The issue is particularly controversial as it relates to juveniles, which is a distinction applied to individuals under the age of 17. Recent data indicates that juvenile drug abuse or drug addiction is still a broad problem in American society, with 0.6% of 8th graders using illicit drugs, 2.1% of 10th graders, and 1.5% of 12th graders (Johnston, O'Malley, Miech, Bachman, & Schulenberg, 2014). Intuitively, the likelihood of antisocial behaviors as an adult is correlated with drug use and offenses as a juvenile, since disadvantages for education and employment realized early in life will have ripple effects as one ages in society. In spite of the still broad usage of illicit drugs among young people in America, usage is in decline, with a roughly 1.4% decrease in the use of illicit drugs across all age groups of juveniles studied; most of that decrease is associated with the decreasing prevalence in marijuana usage, which was down by 1.6% among juveniles in the past year. Consistent with broader trends in society, views of drugs and marijuana among youth in particular are more accepting and has less perceived risk across all juveniles studied. The implications for the treatment versus punishment question posed by the Pew Research poll are clear: if acceptance of drugs is increasing, the spectrum will shift toward treatment instead of prosecution. However, the national debate requires regional context, as federal solutions may not work for localized problems. In order to answer whether treatment or punishment is more appropriate in the issue of juvenile drug abuse, one needs to first develop an understanding of what those concepts are referring to. Importantly, we need to discuss whether treatment and punishment are mutually exclusive and even whether in fact they are the only options available to a municipality in addressing issues related to juvenile drug abuse. The next step in the process is to apply that understanding to a specific situation in a specific city (in this case, Minneapolis) and see what lessons we can draw from that case. After developing an understanding and applying it, the final bridge to cross is to a series of recommendations and ideas about how Minneapolis and cities fundamentally like it can address the issue of treating and/or punishing juveniles for their offenses. We’ll stop short of any legal analyses or suggestions that laws should change – instead, the present discussion is confined to a context in which laws will remain the same, but how we enforce those laws in the context of juveniles in particular cities is of the utmost importance. By the end of this discussion, we will see that justice requires us to do what is best for disadvantaged youth, either as punishment, treatment, or some alternative; and what we define as “best” will vary by situation, so a method of addressing situations individually will be developed further. Punishment Since punishment is a response to crime that is much older than treatment, we begin by describing the concept of punishment. Punishment refers to imposing some unpleasant consequence for a person for a proven action that is decidedly unacceptable to others (Duff, 2001). Examples of punishment include incarceration, which is the response the United States has historically taken in response to the distribution and use of banned substances like heroin, cocaine, and marijuana. The justification for punishment is typically given as either retribution (i.e. taking something away from an offender in proportion to what the offender took from the victim), deterrence (i.e. using threat of punishment to dissuade others in society from committing a similar act), or incapacitation (i.e. to remove an individual from society in order to prevent him or her from committing more crimes). In the United States, the reasoning for a punishment is left to a criminal court’s discretion based on the impact and severity of the crime as well as other factors that might influence whether deterrence or incapacitation is necessary. Arguments in favor of punishment extol its benefits in being the simplest to administer and in sending the clearest message both to the offender and as a deterrent to potential offenders. In addition, favorable arguments point to the effect of punishment on restoring fairness within a community (Baumard, 2012). Serious objections to how fair society is will exist if society negates its objective to punish criminals for wrongdoing because, in a sense, victims are not recompensed for the wrong. Such a thought process behind punishment as retaliation dates back in human history to the way in which cooperation developed: that is, one cannot attack another without risk of being attacked themselves, and the alternative is either avoidance or cooperation. Of course, the limit imposed upon that thought is that retaliation and punishment must be proportionate to the crime committed, rather than causing an additional harm. Arguments against punishment and its role in criminal justice focus on what is gained from punishment and whether it achieves what we intend for it to achieve. Golash (2006) calls upon all of the objectionable examples of punishment in history where the infliction of harm by well-intentioned persons was in the vain pursuit of ends that the harm did not achieve. For instance, she mentions that individuals were sacrificed to appease gods, sick people were subjected to leeches to drain sins from their bodies, and slow schoolchildren were beat to promote learning. By citing such examples of punishment being used for the wrong reason, the upshot of the argument is: how do we know punishments we inflict in today’s society are any different. Perhaps in twenty or thirty years (or even sooner, looking at current trends), we will see incarceration of drug offenders (particularly juvenile offenders) as an injustice against the mentally ill mentionable in the same set of examples as those above. In addition to the minimum harms imposed by prisons in removing liberty, autonomy, and material comforts, many prisons in the United States are abusive, squalid, and poorly-run (Golash, 2006, p. 2). In such cases, the response to the crime may not be proportionate to the sentence. While intuitive, such arguments against punishment as such are not true by necessity but true by circumstances as they are currently. It is not true by necessity that punishment does more harm than good – it only does in some cases; likewise, it is not true by necessity that prisons and jails are squalid – they are only in some cases. No one should rule out punishment on the basis of circumstance; instead, one should think of punishment not as it exists today in the current criminal justice system but think of how punishment should be conducted in particular situations where it is necessary to preserve fairness in the community. In upholding that fairness, society cannot make drastic, inadequately planned changes to how certain crimes are punished; changes must be made gradually and in response to facts. Treatment The concept of providing treatment, as opposed to punishment, in criminal justice contexts is older than most realize. In fact, until the mid-1970s, rehabilitation was a key objective in U.S. prison policy (Benson, 2003). However, that focus shifted – partly in response to the U.S. drug war – toward a tougher stance on crime that replaced rehabilitation with punishment as the main goal of incarceration. The result of that shift has been a drastic increase in the number of individuals under correctional supervision (including probation, parole, jail, or prison) with virtually no impact on crime rates. According to FBI UCS Annual Crime Reports (collected by DisasterCenter.com (2014), the percentage of the adult U.S. population under correctional supervision in 2013 was 3.1% compared to just 1.9% in 1960; in 2013, 3,098.6 (0.0010%) crimes were committed for every 100,000 people, compared to 1,887.2 (0.0011%) in 1960. In other words, in spite of a 164% rise in the proportion of the population under correctional supervision in the past 53 years, crime has only decreased by 6%. Juvenile offenders represent a significant portion of those contemporary figures (Hockenberry, 2010). Clearly, the two approaches have entirely different consequences as the United States is the harshest punisher of juvenile offenders in the world (USF, 2007). The intention of treatment is not only to reverse the effect of punishment on the U.S. correctional system but to address the role that mental illness plays in explaining why individuals end up in the correctional system in the first place. According to Benson (2003), the U.S. Department of Justice estimates approximately 15 to 20 percent of people in prison are mentally ill and one expert has identified prisons as “de facto mental health hospitals”, where society keeps mentally ill people and punishes their physical behaviors rather than dealing with the underlying mental problem instead. Treatment aimed at mental health particularly seeks to shape behavior by addressing mental health, thereby opening the door for incarcerated individuals to be reintegrated into society where they can be happy, productive individuals – rather than consistent re-offenders, which is the predominant trend for criminals who enter the corrections system simply for the sake of punishment. Mental illness as a category is applicable to drug addiction and drug abuse (Stewart & Lurigio, 1999), which also deserves the same kind of treatment if there is a greater emphasis on providing treatment rather than punishment in corrections. A number of arguments exist in favor of treatment over punishment – the primary one being that recidivism (or the rate of re-offending by recently released offenders) is reduced by providing treatment and rehabilitation for inmates when they are incarcerated. That perspective is supported by White (2015), who found that treatment services had a statistically significant effect in reducing recidivism during and shortly after probation supervision for juvenile delinquents. While the receipt of treatment services is not equal across demographic groups (i.e. non-White juvenile offenders tend to receive less treatment than their White counterparts), this is again a problem with circumstance, not with the fact that various treatment services help to rehabilitate and align youths’ interests with those of their communities. The flipside of that finding aligns with the most prevalent argument against re-adopting a treatment focus in our criminal justice system, which is a practical concern that resources are far too limited to equitably distribute treatment services in American prisons. There are simply too few mental health professionals in prisons (Benson, 2003), and the same can be argued for other types of counseling professionals for substance abuse among youths. Effective rehabilitation programs are thus limited in a very severe way. Problematically, a lack of resources may be caused by an excess of prisoners in the corrections system, which is caused by a punishment-first philosophy; in that fashion, an emphasis on punishment may be self-fulfilling. Theories of Delinquency Society’s preference between treating and punishing juveniles also depends on the prevailing philosophical beliefs the community takes toward the cause of juvenile delinquency. In the past, biological theories were prevalent – the idea that delinquent behavior is predisposed and that individuals who commit crimes do so because of heredity or biochemical reasons. Siegel and Welsh (2012) describe modern biological theories are encompassing environmental influences into individuals’ predispositions (or risk factors) for delinquent behaviors. Believing in a biological theory would bias one against considering the efficacy of treatment, as the underlying issue of the delinquent behavior is biological and therefore not changeable with mental health counseling, for example. Sociological theories are less deterministic. Social disorganization theory uses non-ideal childhood development environments (such as poor schools, high poverty levels, etc.) as an explanation for why individuals experience conflict and despair as children. Strain theory looks at whether individuals are able to achieve their individual goals through legitimate means and whether a lack of opportunities will lead them to pursue those goals through illegitimate means. Cultural deviance theory looks at how children turn inward to smaller, isolated social groups like gangs and cults when there are barriers set up between them and the goals set by larger society (such as images of fame and fortune in entertainment) (Siegel & Welsh, 2012). Psychological theories are more concerned with attitudes and beliefs held by individuals rather than the social factors at play. Psychodynamic theory puts the emphasis on abnormal personalities created in earlier life, such as through traumatic experiences. Social learning looks at how criminal behavior is learned through others and how children are born “good” but become “bad” through observing the antisocial behaviors of nearby influencers (Siegel & Welsh, 2012). National Context Having thought about the theories of delinquency as well as the differences between punishment and treatment, it is time to connect that discussion with the scope of the issue both nationally and in a local context. According to FBI Arrest Statistics in 2012, 10.8% of total arrests in the United States were of juveniles, which represents about 1,319,700 individuals (OJJDP, 2013). In Minnesota’s Hennepin County, of which Minneapolis is by far the largest city, that percentage was 21.0% of total arrests, representing about 13,317 individuals. Compared to Pittsburgh, PA’s Allegheny County, Phoenix, AR’s Maricopa County, and Nashville, TN’s Davidson County, the results are presented from 1994 to 2012 in Figures 1 and 2. Compared to other mid-sized metropolitan areas, Minneapolis is in clear second behind Phoenix for the total count of arrested juveniles (13,317 compared to 18,799). However, when looking at a population-adjusted figure such as the proportion of juvenile arrests to all arrests, Minneapolis is in a clear first place with 21.0% of arrests representing juveniles compared to every other city in the range from 9.0 to 12.0%. Pittsburgh and Phoenix have trended down in their total juvenile arrests, while Nashville had an uptick in 2010 but has been decreasing. The higher rate, however, has been steadily decreasing since 2006 and from sources within the state of Minnesota, the peak of juvenile crime actually occurred throughout the 1980s and 1990s – and as of 2010, the state was nearing 30-year lows on juvenile arrests (Swayze & Buskovick, 2013). According to the report authors, this trend maps onto broader observations about national juvenile crime rate data. Nevertheless, from 2010 to 2012, there has been an uptick in the total number of juvenile arrests within Minneapolis specifically, even while the ratio of juvenile to adult arrests has gone down over the same period. Swayze and Buskovick (2014) attribute variation in Minnesota’s juvenile crime arrest record to a variety of socio-economic conditions, issues related to prevention and intervention funding, and public policies related to at-risk youth and delinquents. From the late 1980s to the mid-1990s, juvenile justice was primarily reactive (again, consistent with national trends), but restorative justice practices have largely been adopted in the 2000s – largely in response to public support for treatment rather than punishment. Nevertheless, since the old mindset of reactivity is still at play, the availability of resources is shrinking because crime is, on the whole, decreasing among juveniles (Swayze & Buskovick, 2014). That means a smaller corrections population is receiving less and less attention from a treatment and rehabilitation perspective, which ultimately hurts those who find themselves within the system. Recidivism in Minnesota is a large concern, especially after a recent study found that recidivism rates in the state are higher than the national average and among the nation’s worst performers on that metric (Pew Center on the States, 2011). In 1992, out of concern about juvenile recidivism, the state of Minnesota established pilot projects to identify and treat the underlying mental health problems that contribute to delinquency (Swayze & Buskovick, 2014, p. 51). In theory, treatment reduces recidivism by helping incarcerated individuals “get back on their feet” when they are eventually released, as opposed to punishment, which is thought will deter people from re-entering the corrections system based on their previous loss of freedom. However, there are some reasons why recidivism is an inadequate as a measure of whether treatment is more effective with punishment. For example, even though Minnesota has one of the highest recidivism rates, it also has the nation’s second-lowest prison incarceration rate. Only around 9,500 inmates current serve time in prison, compared to its next-door neighbor Wisconsin with about 24,000 inmates. According to state officials, Minnesota reserves prison space to only high-risk offenders, who are inherently more likely reoffend than low-risk criminals – which is not an issue either punishment or treatment can address (Walsh, 2011). Thus, recidivism can be misleading. An appropriate alternative to evaluating the success or failure of either treatment or punishment through recidivism and “penal welfarism” is a newer concept known as “actuarial justice”, which applies statistics and other evaluations of risk to figure out the likelihood of society being negatively impacted by criminals (Jenkins, 2014). By assessing risk in accurate ways, we can evaluate whether treatment or punishment programs are effective in reducing harm at a societal level, which can then guide us toward a solution of which approach is more effective in the end. The exact methods of doing this kind of analysis are still in development, but the potential application is extensive. Conclusions The catch-22 where treatment budgets are reduced to the point where mental health and youth counseling professionals are scarce when a state moves away from an emphasis on punishment and reduces its prison population shows that treatment and punishment are not mutually exclusive options in the reduction of juvenile delinquency. Both avenues are necessary and their respective effectiveness will vary based on whether the juvenile is a high- or low-risk offender. However, as the state of New York is finding out in the wake of its own punishment to treatment reforms, it is difficult to keep criminal justice considerations separate from clinical concerns about offenders’ mental health (Riggs, Parsons, Wei, & Drucker, 2014). In response to that difficulty, a risk evaluation (through the methods of actuarial justice) should be completed for each and all juvenile delinquents entering or re-entering the corrections system – the purpose of which would be to emphasize punishment for high-risk offenders and to emphasize treatment for low-risk offenders. Rather than using recidivism as a way of evaluating whether the system is effective or not, the new system – by already considering overall risk to society as a more holistic metric – would present a more comprehensive alternative. In addition, in our review of Minneapolis versus similarly sized cities’ juvenile crime data, we saw how different local contexts can be and – even within a particular city – that trends can change and crime can either increase or decrease. Combined with how risky that criminal behavior is to society as a whole and the community’s predominant theory of juvenile delinquency, more research needs to be done to clarify how each of these factors fit together in a way to aid the criminal justice system. While statistics are certainly helpful for identifying trends and correlations, most of the story cannot be quantitatively captured and must be accounted for through a case-by-case evaluation of the facts. References Baumard, N. (2012). The restorative logic of punishment: Another argument in favor of weak selection. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 35, 17-18. doi:10.1017/S0140525X11001166 Benson, E. (2003, July). Rehabilitate or punish? Monitor, 34, 46. Retrieved from American Psychological Association: http://www.apa.org/monitor/julaug03/rehab.aspx DisasterCenter.com. (2014). United States crime rates 1960 - 2013. Retrieved from DisasterCenter.com: http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm Doherty, C., Horowitz, J., & Suis, R. (2014, April 2). America’s new drug policy landscape. Retrieved from Pew Research Center: http://www.people-press.org/files/legacy-pdf/04-02-14%20Drug%20Policy%20Release.pdf Duff, A. (2001, January 2). Legal punishment. Retrieved from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/legal-punishment/#PunCriSta Golash, D. (2006). The case against punishment: Retribution, crime prevention, and the law. New York: NYU Press. Hockenberry, S. (2010). Juveniles in residential placement, 2010. Office of Justice Programs. Washington D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice. Jenkins, S. (2014). The rise of actuarialism: the influence of new penology on penal policy and a critical evaluation of how successful actuarial justice has been in protecting the public from 'dangerous offenders'. Portmouth: University of Portmouth. Johnston, L., O'Malley, P., Miech, R., Bachman, J., & Schulenberg, J. (2014). Monitoring the future: National survey on drug use. Ann Arbor: The National Institute on Drug Abuse. OJJDP. (2013). Easy Access to FBI Arrest Statistics: . Retrieved from Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention: http://ojjdp.gov/ojstatbb/ezaucr/asp/ucr_display.asp Pew Center on the States. (2011). State of recidivism: The revolving door of America's prisons. Washington D.C.: The Pew Charitable Trusts. Riggs, R., Parsons, J., Wei, Q., & Drucker, E. (2014). From punishment to treatment: A providers’ perspective on the implementation of 2009 Rockefeller Drug Law reforms in New York. Health & Justice, 2, 1-14. doi:10.1186/2194-7899-2-10 Savage, C. (2013, August 12). Justice Department seeks to curtain stiff drug sentences. Retrieved from The New York Times: http://www.texaspolicy.com/library/docLib/08122013-roc-nyt.pdf Siegel, L., & Welsh, B. (2012). Juvenile delinquency: Theory, practice, and law. New York: Cengage Learning. Stewart, J., & Lurigio, A. (1999). Psychiatric illness and comorbidity among adult male jail detainees in drug treatment. Psychiatric Services, 50, 1628-1630. doi:10.1176/ps.50.12.1628 Swayze, D., & Buskovick, D. (2013). Back to the future, volume 1: Thirty years of Minnesota juvenile justice data 1980-2010. St. Paul, MN: MN Department of Public Safety. Swayze, D., & Buskovick, D. (2014). Back to the future, volume 2: Thirty years of Minnesota juvenile justice policy and practice 1980-2010. St. Paul, MN: MN Department of Public Safety. USF. (2007). Laws of Other Nations. Retrieved from University of San Francisco School of Law: http://www.usfca.edu/law/jlwop/other_nations/ Walsh, P. (2011, April 13). Minnesota leads nation in recidivism. Retrieved from StarTribune: http://www.startribune.com/local/119762014.html Read More