Drug Addiction and Incarceration: A Call for Research and Transparency Among Prison-Based Substance Abuse Treatment Programs

Abstract

As drug-related offense and illicit drug overdose rates continue to grow in the United States, criminologists have begun to pay more attention to factors influencing illicit drug use as well as effective methods of promoting drug abstinence in treatment programs across the nation. Although much scholarly attention is given to community-based substance abuse treatment programs, a considerably smaller focus of research is devoted to substance abuse treatment programs that are prison-based. Moreover, some of the most effective methods of treating inmates who are addicted to an illicit drug (such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Therapeutic Community, etc.), although praised for their initiative and theoretical effectiveness, are often demonstrated via individualized empirical study that the expected advantages of such programmatic forms of treatment fail to emerge. The present study explores what scholars have discovered regarding the effectiveness of prison-based substance abuse treatment programs, how such findings appear to contradict one another, and why state prison systems should be more transparent regarding their in-house drug treatment programs in their publicly accessible reports that are formulated into cumulative reports on each states’ Bureau of Corrections websites.