Inmate drug rehab program 'a complete waste of money'

Liberalism gets the treatment in The Los Angeles Times:

California's $1-billion investment in drug treatment for prisoners since 1989 has been "a complete waste of money," the independent Office of the Inspector General said today, doing nothing to reduce the number of inmates cycling in and out of prison.

One lengthy UCLA study of the state's two largest in-prison programs found that recidivism rates for inmates who participated were slightly higher than those of a group of convicts who did not receive treatment, Inspector General Matt Cate said.

Perhaps most distressing, Cate said, the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation has been told in more than 20 reports since 1997 that the programs are failing. Yet officials have done nothing to fix them, choosing instead to expand them and fund additional studies of their results.

"Successful treatment programs could reduce the cost to society of criminal activity related to drug abuse, change lives, and help relieve the state's prison overcrowding crisis," Cate, the nonpartisan watchdog over corrections, said in a 50-page report. "But so far the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation has squandered that opportunity."

And yet Californians continue voting for Democrats, as if they can make the world of their big-hearted dreams replace the actual world in which we live.

Prisons are storage bins for undesirables. Using them for other purposes is "a complete waste of money."