(also see Drug Courts and the Judicial Educator)

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Media release

Fifty-two prisoners have graduated from a unique new rehabilitation program at Casuarina Prison designed to break the cycle of addiction to alcohol and other drugs that so often leads to criminal behaviour.

The nine-month program, called Solid Steps, was developed by the Department of Justice in conjunction with external service providers the Palmerston Association and Wungening Aboriginal Corporation.

It is the first residential alcohol and other drug rehabilitation program to be delivered in an adult male prison in Western Australia.

Department of Justice Director General, Dr Adam Tomison, said breaking the cycle of addiction is critical to improving community safety in the longer term.

"Solid Steps aims to deliver a holistic program which enables prisoners to reduce their alcohol and drug dependence by developing strategies and skills to address risky, harmful and destructive behaviours that lead to poor choices and criminality," Dr Tomison said.

"The program is based on a culturally safe, modified therapeutic community model. It also strengthens connection to self, family, culture and community."

Just over 40 per cent of the program’s participants are Aboriginal.

Solid Steps is delivered five days a week by trained health experts, counsellors and support staff.

Dr Tomison said support for the program graduates continues beyond the prison.

"A comprehensive through-care framework has been developed to support the participants’ recovery journey, whether they are transitioning back into the community or remaining in custody for now," Dr Tomison said.

"There's no sugar-coating the reality that breaking addiction to alcohol or drugs is hard – really hard – and it isn’t always achieved on the first attempt."

Dr Tomison said by investing in programs like Solid Steps, the Department of Justice hoped to drive recidivism rates down.

"If we can help the vast majority of Solid Steps graduates stop using alcohol and drugs and they then don’t commit any more offences, that’s a win-win," Dr Tomison said.

"There’ll be less people being harmed and less people as victims of crime. And these men will be leading more productive lives, which is really important for them and their families, and overall it’s going to be cheaper for the community."

One participating prisoner, a Noongar man who cannot be identified for privacy reasons, said he volunteered for the Solid Steps program after spending the past 20 years in and out of the justice system.

"It’s the longest I’ve been clean in the past 10 years and my confidence has grown every day that I can say no to drugs because I know what I’ve got in life, I know everything I can be thankful for in life and I don’t want to lose all that because I go down that same path of drugs and crime again," he said.

The Solid Steps program continues at the Mallee Unit with rolling intakes every four to six weeks.

Prisoners graduate from unique addiction-breaking program at Casuarina (www.wa.gov.au)

This paper takes the reader on an evidence base journey into perspectives on drug policy interpretation and application that transcends the, often myopic, policy 'silo' perspectives.

The misuse and/or reinterpretation of evidence, including reworking nomenclature, has seen a growing emphasis on drug use in a victim only light. Certainly, once the tyranny of addiction has taken hold, and agency and capacity diminished (not eradicated) such emphasis has some merit.

However, the vastly overwhelming number of those up taking drug use are not in that category and many other cultural, psycho-social and anthropological factors are the drivers behind drug uptake, not least curiosity and hedonism. This behavioural choice is not the action of a ‘victim’ rather something completely different. This paper looks at the drug issue on health, justice and cultural contexts whilst endeavouring to rise above the policy emphasis silos that so often drive narratives and the policy decisions emerging from them.

Abridged version also peer reviewed and published in The Journal of Global Drug Policy and Practice and published in their Journal release (VOLUME 11, ISSUE 2- Spring 2017) 

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The road to hell was paved with victimology

Michael Shellenberger, 14th August 2021,

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, I worked with a group of friends and colleagues to advocate drug decriminalization, harm reduction, and criminal justice reform. I helped progressive Congressperson Maxine Waters organize civil rights leaders to advocate for needle exchange so that heroin users wouldn’t get HIV-AIDS. I fought for the treatment of drug addiction as a public health problem not a criminal justice one. And we demanded that housing be given to the homeless without regard for their own struggles with drugs.

Our intentions were good. We thought it was irrational to criminalize the distribution of clean needles to drug users when doing so had proven to save lives. We were upset about mass incarceration, particularly of African Americans and Latinos, for nonviolent drug offenses. And we believed that the approach European nations like the Netherlands and Portugal had taken to decriminalize drugs, and expand drug treatment, was the right one.

But it’s obvious now that we were wrong. Over the last 20 years the U.S. liberalized drug laws. During that time, deaths from illicit drugs rose from 17,000 to 93,000. Two and a half times more people die from illicit drug use than from car accidents; five times more die from drugs than homicide. Many of those people are homeless and die alone in the hotel rooms and apartment units given away as part of the harm reduction-based “Housing First” approach to homelessness. Others are children found dead by their parents on the floors of their rooms.

What about mass incarceration? It’s true that nearly half of the people in federal prisons are there for nonviolent drug offenses. But there are eight times more people in state prisons than federal prisons, and just 14 percent of people in state prisons are there for nonviolent drug offenses and just 4 percent for nonviolent possession. Half of state prisoners are there for murder, rape, robbery and other violent offenses.

While it’s true that both Netherlands and Portugal reduced criminal penalties, both nations still ban drug dealing, arrest drug users, and sentence dealers and users to prison or rehabilitation. “If somebody in Portugal started injecting heroin in public,” I asked the head of drug policy in that country, “what would happen to them?” He said, without hesitation, “They would be arrested.”

And being arrested is sometimes what addicts need. “I am a big fan of mandated stuff,” said Victoria Westbrook. “I don't recommend it as a way to get your life together, but getting indicted by the Feds worked for me. I wouldn't have done this without them.” Today Victoria is working for the San Francisco city government to integrate ex-convicts back into society.

But people in progressive cities are today shouted down for even suggesting a role for law enforcement. “Anytime a person says, ‘Maybe the police and the health care system could work together?’ or, ‘Maybe we could try some probation or low-level arrests,’ there’s an enormous outcry,” said Stanford addiction specialist Keith Humphreys. “‘No! That’s the war on drugs! The police have no role in this! Let’s open up some more services and people will come in and use them voluntarily!’”

Why is that? Why, in the midst of the worst drug death crisis in world history, and the examples of Portugal and Netherlands, are progressives still opposed to shutting down the street fentanyl markets in places like San Francisco that are killing people?

And the core motivation of the people I worked with was ideological. Many people, including many progressives, were libertarian, and fundamentally believed the government did not have a right to tell able-bodied adults what drugs they could and could not use. But many more, myself included, were upset by mass incarceration, and the ways in which incarceration destroys families, disproportionately African American and Latino ones.

Our views were too simplistic and wrong. Many things undermine families and communities, of all colors, well before anyone is incarcerated, including drugs and the crime and violence associated with them. And, violent communities attract the drug trade more than the drug trade makes communities violent, both scholars and journalists find. 

The problem is that, in the process of valuing care so much, progressives abandon other important values, argue Haidt and other researchers in a field called Moral Foundations Theory. While progressives (“liberal” and “very liberal” people) hold the values of Caring, Fairness, and Liberty, they tend to reject the values of Sanctity, Authority, and Loyalty as wrong. Because these values are so deeply held, often subconsciously, Moral Foundations Theory explains well why so many progressives and conservatives today view each other as not merely uninformed but immoral.

At the Sites the city isn’t providing drug treatment; it’s providing easy access to drugs. That includes cash in the form of welfare payments with which to purchase drugs, and the equipment with which to inject them. As such, progressives cities like San Francisco are directly financing the drug death crisis.

Is this Munchausen syndrome by proxy, which is when a parent deliberately makes their child sick so they can feel important? In San Fransicko, I consider this possibility, and ultimately conclude that while the progressive approach to drug addiction and homelessness can be fairly described as pathological altruism, it would be unfair to call it sadistic. Many of the drug-addicted and mentally ill homeless are, in fact, sick, and most progressives have good intentions. 

But it is not unfair to point out that the city’s approach of playing the Rescuer is resulting in worsening addiction and rising drug deaths. Nor is it unfair to point out that we limit people’s potential for freedom by labeling them Victims and “centering” their trauma, rather than viewing victimization as an opportunity for heroism. Nor is it unfair to point out, as I have attempted to do by describing the history, that San Francisco’s political, business, and cultural leaders should all know better by now.

Progressives justify their discourse and agenda in the name of preventing dehumanization, but the effect has been the opposite. In defending the humanity of addicts, progressives ended up defending the inhumane conditions of street addiction….

For complete article

For further Reading

Social Determinants and Substance Use

OPEN LETTER on Decriminalization of Drugs 2020  

Also see

• Re-tasking the Judicial Educator to Rehabilitate Not Incarcerate
• He Lost Nearly Everything To Addiction. Then An Arrest Changed His Life
• ‘Tried & Tested’ Drug Court Moves to Dubbo
• Woman who fought meth addiction says Drug Treatment Court saved her life.
• Alternatives to Incarceration
• Drugs courts: Justice system that aims to rehabilitate
• AOD Primary Prevention Primer
• Drug Use & Stigma