Michael Douglas blasts the US penal system at the Emmys. He's exactly right

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/24/michael-douglas-emmys-son-prison-system

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Michael Douglas caused a few ripples on Sunday night when he picked up an Emmy award for his performance as Liberace in the film, Behind the Candelabra. Aside from gently ribbing his co-star Matt Damon and thanking his estranged wife Catherine Zeta Jones, Douglas gave a shout out to his eldest son, Cameron, who is in currently being held in solitary confinement in a federal penitentiary.

"I'm hoping I'll be able and they'll allow me to see him soon," Douglas told the audience before explaining to reporters backstage that he has begun to question the system that is preventing him from even visiting his incarcerated son. You can hardly blame the veteran actor for his disenchantment with America's penal system as his son's case pretty much epitomizes the futility of sending a person who is addicted to drugs into a bleak and lonely institution where drugs are readily available and treatment is not.

In 2010, Cameron Douglas was sentenced to five years in prison for small time drug dealing and possession for personal use. At the time of his sentencing, Douglas had a five time a day heroin habit. Strangely enough, however, the addiction that plunged his life into chaos and then landed him in prison did not magically cure itself once he was incarcerated. A little over a year later, after falling foul to his addiction, Douglas was back before a judge who added an additional 4.5 years to his sentence – the harshest ever imposed on an inmate for taking drugs in prison, according to his lawyer.

As if doubling his sentence for this transgression was not enough, Douglas has also had to spend 2 out of the 4 years of his incarceration to date in solitary confinement, where he is locked down 23 hours a day and denied visits from his loved ones. This, apparently, is what passes for drug treatment in the US federal prison system. As treatment programs go, it's not just inhumane, but is also an outrageous waste of taxpayer dollars. Jesse Lava, campaign director for Beyond Bars, a prison reform advocacy group, puts it this way:

Prison doesn't cure addiction. The idea that intensifying the prison experience to cure addiction is simply wrong headed.

When it comes to US prison policy, however, and especially the war on drugs, wrong headedness seems to rule the day.

People may have little sympathy for Cameron Douglas, the poor little rich kid who had it all and couldn't handle any of it. He did break the law numerous times by dealing drugs to feed his habit and deserved to be sanctioned for that. It's reasonable to assume also that if he had come from a poor minority background, he may have received an even harsher initial sentence and no one would have been writing newspaper articles about him or calling out to him during high profile award ceremonies. Still his case deserves attention as it typifies the stupidity of the war on drugs that has caused America's prison population to explode while doing almost nothing to eradicate drug use in our society.

There are currently over 500,000 non-violent drug offenders serving time in America's correctional institutions, counting for nearly a quarter of the country's entire prison population. In the federal system, where Douglas is doing his time, over half of all inmates are incarcerated for drug offenses. In just over 30 years, the federal prison population has experienced a ten-fold increase, from around 21,000 in 1980 to over 218,000 today, an unprecedented rise that can be attributed directly to the war on drugs and the mandatory minimum sentencing laws that are its arsenal. Many cash strapped states have had to enact reforms in the recent past and turn to drug treatment alternatives to cope with their unsustainable prison populations. The more affluent federal system has been slower to catch on but at last there is some hope on the horizon.

Last month, speaking to the American Bar Association in San Francisco, Attorney General Eric Holder tacitly acknowledged that the situation has gotten out of control and unveiled a number of reforms. Prosecutors now have the discretion not to list the amount of drugs in cases involving low-level, non-violent offenders with no ties to gangs or large scale drug organizations so the indictment won't trigger the attendant mandatory minimum sentence upon conviction. This reform will also apply to offenders who have already been convicted but not yet sentenced. Holder said:

We must face the reality that, as it stands, our system is, in too many ways, broken. And with an outsized, unnecessarily large prison population, we need to ensure that incarceration is used to punish, to deter and to rehabilitate — not merely to warehouse and to forget.

Unfortunately, the reforms Holder announced so far do not have a retroactive component so hundreds of thousands of non-violent offenders like Cameron Douglas with drug addiction issues are still being warehoused and forgotten. "Federal prisons are full of people who don't need to be there," says Jeremy Haile, federal advocacy counsel for the Sentencing Project, "instead they need drug treatment and it's not clear how much treatment is available or if any of that treatment is adequate". Recidivism rates among drug offenders would suggest that whatever treatment is on offer is not remotely adequate and there is no evidence that the prison system plans to reform its treatment policies.

In on open letter published by the Huffington Post in June of this year, Cameron Douglas attempted to raise awareness of his own predicament and that of other non-violent offenders who have been left to rot in prison. He wrote:

Unfortunately, "whereas the effective remedy for relapse should be treatment, the penal system's 'answer' is to lock the door and throw away the key.

This may satisfy harsh punishment enthusiasts' notion of justice but all it does is waste billions of dollars, while destroying prisoners' lives and heaping pain and suffering on their families. No wonder after seeing what four years in one of America's so called correctional facilities has done for his drug addicted son, Michael Douglas is disillusioned with the system. US taxpayers, who are footing the bill for this fiasco, should be disillusioned too.

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