The Need

In 2005, there were 27,376 felony arrests in Harris County, the third most populous county in the United States. Drug related crimes accounted for 14,023 of those arrests and resulted in 9,242 state jail convictions for the offense of possession of a group one controlled substance- usually cocaine. Sixty percent of those individuals were repeat offenders. According to the 2006 records of Harris County's Department of Court Services, more than seventeen percent of those repeat offenders have five or more previous drug-related offenses.

The Past Approach

In the past, Harris County courts had limited options for addressing repeat drug offenders other than incarceration in a state jail facility. As shown by the large number of repeat offenders, penally enforced abstinence is rarely effective. After conviction, 92% of these second offenders end up serving out their sentences in Texas' state jail facilities. And as seen earlier, more than 1,600 of those individuals have five or more convictions. This approach is not practical from a therapeutic or fiscal perspective. Let's do the math.

The Costs

It costs the State $33.78 per day to house one offender in State Jail Division facilities. According to the Texas Legislative Budget Board, the annual cost to the taxpayers to incarcerate these individuals is $13,174.00. If more than 1,600 individuals with substance abuse problems reoffend and reenter the system five or more times, the costs for merely housing them will run into the tens of millions of dollars. This gargantuan bill does not include any funding for substance abuse counseling or treatment, and the State's penal institutions generally do not provide such treatment. While an often repeated mantra used when discussing drug offenders has been, "Lock them up and throw away the key," the reality is most offenders will be back on the streets within one year of incarceration, and those who do not receive counseling and treatment will continue to offend. The jailhouse door will become little more than a turnstile.

A New Approach

Returning to a lifestyle of drug abuse is, for those who have received no substance abuse counseling or life skills training while incarcerated, often an inevitable choice. It does not have to be that way. Some Texas drug courts with established track records are making a difference in the lives of would-be repeat offenders. While Texas jails have a 48% recidivism rate for those persons who, once paroled, commit similar crimes and return to jail, Texas drug courts report a recidivism rate of between 8% and 24%. This is hard evidence that treatment is more effective than simple incarceration in reducing recidivism. As Mary Covington, program manager of Harris County Drug Court's Success Through Addiction Recovery (STAR) program, observed, addiction is a disease and the most effective solution is treatment. "Clearly, nobody wants to be an addict," Covington said. "Nobody wakes up one morning at the age of 15 and says, 'I think I'll see what I can do to completely destroy my life.'"