High, and ever in the pursuit of the next high, Goble would stay awake for days on end, committing burglaries to fund his habit -- and for thrills. For most of the past decade, he has cycled in and out of jail and prison. When he was booked for the last time into Elkhart County Jail, he was strung out and emaciated.
Now, Goble is in a program to get clean of meth and crime called CLIFF -- in a cell block entirely devoted to meth addicts in this maximum security prison.
"I really want to live a clean life to where I ain't gotta get up and just get high or get up and feel like just going out and doing something stupid," said Goble. Tears well up in his eyes next to the tears tattooed on his cheek bones, as he recalls a promise he made to his dying grandfather. "I decided I was gonna come (into the CLIFF program) and do what I could to better myself and hold a promise to him to be better and not come back."
Goble's struggle is a small window into a costly national problem.
Substance abuse and addiction cost federal, state and local governments at least $467 billion annually according to a recent study by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University. Nearly 96 percent of that is spent on the "human wreckage" of substance abuse -- including drug-related crime, incarceration, health care, foster care. About 1.9 percent goes to prevention and treatment, the report says.
Due to state and local budget problems spurred on by the recession, law enforcement, courts, and prison systems are strapped. Treatment and prevention programs -- underfunded, advocates say, even in better times -- are struggling with shrinking resources.
"The recession has been really tough for providers as well as patients," said Daniel Guarnera, director of government relations for NAADAC, a national association for addiction professionals.
In Elkhart, meth is not the only illegal drug, but it is the one that has dealt the hardest blow to its working class gut, bringing down many men and women who staffed the area's RV factories. And over the course of the recession, at least one aspect of the problem has worsened: By mid-November, Elkhart County had discovered more than 100 meth labs this year, compared to 75 in 2008, and 77 from 1999 through 2006, according to State Police records.
TOUGH PROSECUTION
Under a state law passed in 2005, sentencing for meth possession and production got stiffer. But tough prosecution means more pressure on the corrections system.
That's one reason Elkhart County Sheriff Mike Books has filled up an 890-bed jail, built at a cost of $90 million and opened just two years ago to replace an old, overcrowded facility. He estimates 75 percent of the people in the facility are there for crimes related either directly or indirectly related to drugs -- often meth.
The county is responsible for providing health care of offenders booked into the jail and has a $2 million annual budget for that, Books said. And drug abusers, especially meth users run up costs quickly. They frequently have a mouth full of corroded teeth, which can cost $12,000 in dental care alone, he said. They may also need treatment for everything from withdrawal and skin lesions to kidney damage, running up bills in the tens of thousands of dollars.
When these drug offenders are kicked up the line to prison, it usually doesn't get any easier to break the pattern -- and high cost -- of drug use, crime and incarceration. Indeed, one inmate in the CLIFF program at Miami, 27-year-old Paul Rice, said it was while serving a previous sentence at Indiana's Branchville Correctional Facility that he learned how to make meth from other inmates while out on road crews and that he used heavily while he was in the prison.
CHRONIC UNDERFUNDING
Books has done his own back-of-the envelope calculation about the costs of booking the same people into jail time after time, and he says he'd like to see more drug treatment and other programs in the jail to lower recidivism -- which he says is 60 to 65 percent in Elkhart. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services estimates that each $1 invested in drug and alcohol treatment saves about $7 in criminal justice costs and nearly twice that when health care savings are included.
"You can't just look at it as warehousing folks, or we will just keep building bigger jails," said Books.
But getting approval for funding drug treatment programs has always been difficult here -- many people don't see reason to spend money on addicts -- and is even more challenging during a recession.
"There's no question that the weak link in our system in substance abuse assistance," said Books. "Recession certainly impacts tax dollars. Tax dollars pay for services and services diminish when we don't have the dollars to do that. It's a Catch-22 situation."
In Elkhart, one early casualty of budget cuts is a team that evaluated substance abusers for the drug court, which diverts low-level offenders who meet certain criteria to treatment and monitoring rather than jail. The program, with a staff of eight, used to assess and monitor 800 to 900 clients a year according to director Scott Filley. After Jan. 1, the workload will likely fall upon overburdened probation officers or to the private sector.
Limited help is available from the federal government. While there was nothing in the stimulus bill specifically targeting drug treatment, the legislation did include $2 billion for broad application in the fight against crime, from investigating drug-trafficking organizations to drug rehab. Elkhart County is slated to receive $264,000 of these funds, and has so far spent about $95,000 of the total to buy vehicles and video equipment.
By all accounts, the 2010 federal budget will eliminate the 25-year-old Safe and Drug Free Schools State Grants program, funded at $295 million last year -- money that was used for drug and violence prevention programs. At the same time, the budget will almost certainly increase funding for drug courts, from a current level of $63 million. In recent years, many legislators have embraced the courts as a cost-saving way of handling non-violent drug offenders.
NEW APPROACH TO TREATMENT
Along with the entire Indiana prison system, CLIFF -- the fledgling treatment program where Goble and other inmates are being treated -- is feeling budgetary pressures. Staffers who leave CLIFF are often not replaced, so remaining counselors work grueling shifts. And, because the rest of the prison is overcrowded, the CLIFF cell block is sometimes forced to temporarily take on prisoners from the general population -- which can make harder to keep the CLIFF participants on track, said Patricia Pretorius, the program's director at Miami.
"Everybody here is focused on their recovery, which is hopefully not going to be the negative behaviors you were surrounded by in general population," Pretorius said. "We teach them that from the time you wake up in the morning to the time they go to bed at night, it's all about your recovery."
Goble, who is serving a six-year term, is in for a burglary. But his meth addiction is viewed as his core problem, so he was allowed to join the program. He and other prisoners who qualify for CLIFF have joined it voluntarily.
In this cell block of about 200 beds, participants agree to a rigorous schedule, which starts with a military-style inspection first thing in the morning, followed by a full day of substance-abuse counseling, classes, study and peer group sessions.
Pretorius said the program is making a difference. Recidivism among offenders who have gone through the CLIFF programs in four programs statewide is about 24 percent, compared to 37 percent in the general population, she said.
That gives a guy like Goble a fighting chance to escape the meth-saturated world he has occupied.
"You learn things about yourself that you wouldn't look into," Goble said of the program. "I'm hoping to get tools out of it that make me live a better life than what I was living."
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