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CSAM Press Release: Stanford University Tuition Costs Less Than One Year at a California State Prison
For Immediate Release MEDIA ADVISORY (March 5, 2007)
Contact: Kerry Parker, 415-927-5730
California Society of Addiction Medicine www.csam-asam.org
[San Francisco, CA] A group of concerned physicians visited Sacramento this week to speak with legislators about the outrageous cost of incarcerating non-violent drug offenders -- $43,000 a year! The cost is higher than a year’s tuition at Stanford University. “We wanted to tell our legislators that building more expensive prisons is not the solution to the overcrowding problem,” said Dr. David Pating, President of the California Society of Addiction Medicine (CSAM). “One solution is to avoid prison usage by getting non-violent drug offenders into drug treatment programs and back to being productive members of society,” said Pating.
The physicians told legislators that the Governor must be urged to adequately re-fund Proposition 36, a voter-approved program that has proved effective over the past five years and which is now seeking renewed funding in order to broaden its reach and expand its effectiveness statewide. According to a recent UCLA study, the program has saved California $1.3 billion over five years. With proper funding, it can continue to show effective savings, and together with other efforts, can play an important role in solving the problem of overcrowded prisons.
“We need not just one quick-fix solution, but a series of steps at many levels to address the prison crisis by first looking at a large group of people who may not belong in prison. These are people who instead belong in treatment programs which cost far less,” said Pating.
The doctors also shared other concrete recommendations for reducing the burden on California prisons including requiring emergency rooms to screen patients for drug use in order to get them into treatment sooner (AB1461) and requiring insurance companies to provide coverage for substance abuse treatment at the same levels as they insure for diseases (AB423).
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