[trentnix]

Incarceration is what triggered a family member to finally have success fighting their addiction. Loss of job and family wasn't rock bottom for them. Incarceration was. And they've since rebuilt their life and their family. Incarceration was the trigger that made that possible.

I'm sympathetic to your point and to all who are subject to any drug or alcohol addiction. But I feel compelled to comment that incarceration is not always the inhumane dead-end that it's painted as. It's one of many tools that can be used to rehabilitate those in need.

[drewcoo]

When we can't deal with issues openly, especially mental health issues, we often see the "tough" route promoted.

That would be "rock bottom" in your anecdote.

Consider how PTSD used to be treated back when it was "shell shock" and considered a personal moral failure. People were told there was nothing wrong. Many of those people "recovered," too. But was that the right way to treat people facing real problems?

[hospadar]

I'm SURE that there are MANY people for whom incarceration "worked" (i.e., didn't get back in jail, broke their addiction), but on the whole, there's a lot of evidence that incarceration is simply not the most effective (expensive/doesn't work well for many) strategy for reducing drug usage and drug-related health and social ills.

We don't have to guess, there's a lot (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1745-9125....) of evidence (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004727270...) that locking people up for drug use isn't _very_ effective (isn't very effective != completely ineffective) at reducing crime or recidivism, and great evidence that decriminalization (i.e. portugal https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1464837) sends crime (AND drug usage) downward, as well as a host of drug-related medical conditions.

(^ first page of google scholar results people)

[eloff]

Incarceration is not aimed at rehabilitating, it's aimed at punishing. That it occasionally rehabilitates by accident is not an argument in favor.

If the goal is rehabilitation, then let's talk about how to best do that.

[carapace]

Thousands of people have had their lives ruined by being incarcerated for possession of cannabis. Hundreds of thousands maybe. Most of them weren't addicts, or committing other crimes, they were just in the wrong place at the wrong time with a bag of weed in their pockets or whatever.

It's good that your family member finally had success fighting their addiction, but at what price?

[aaomidi]

Did this person have a home to get back to? People to support them financially once he was out?

The way incarceration impacts people is extremely different.

[spaetzleesser]

I wonder what the proportion of people is for who incarceration is the start of recovery vs people for who incarceration is the start of a downward spiral.

My guess is that incarceration for non violent drug offenders has way more negative outcomes vs positive outcomes. I used to work out at a boxing gym and there were quite a few people whose possibility of finding an ok job was almost zero because a marijuana or cocaine conviction had put a negative mark on their background checks. This is especially true for poor neighborhoods where families don’t have the financial ability to support other family members who have problems.

[rm_-rf_slash]

If incarceration was a common rock bottom that addicts could build up from, I might agree with you, but knowing what we know about recidivism among addicts, it is likelier to be an aggregate negative even if a few people find a way to recover during their sentence.

[MrRiddle]

How do you rehabilitate a person if they’re unable to find a reasonable job afterwards?

[dahdum]

> But I feel compelled to comment that incarceration is not always the inhumane dead-end that it's painted as. It's one of many tools that can be used to rehabilitate those in need.

Most of Europe has compulsory treatment options instead of incarceration, but due to abuses in the past it's a non-starter in the US.