The state of Maryland has increased the budget for criminal rehabilitation for the next fiscal year, while decreasing expenditures on prisons. Governor Robert Ehrlich, Jr. announced the plan as a way to reaffirm his administration’s commitment to rehabilitate nonviolent offenders, who consist mostly of drug users. The Ehrlich administration should be commended for giving these offenders the help they need, so they can rejoin society and not continue to cycle through an overcrowded corrections system.
Project RESTART, or Re-entry, Enforcement and Services Targeting Addiction, Rehabilitation and Treatment, receives $9.2 million in Maryland’s 2005 state budget. This is the first program under the Ehrlich administration, which began in 2003 specifically aimed at rehabilitation. Approximately $1.2 million will be used to hire 210 staffers to run the program. It is hoped that RESTART will help lower the state’s rate of reconviction, which sits at 51 percent, higher than the national average.
At the same time, Maryland is also spending $23 million less on the prison infrastructure indicating a shift in focus away from prison expansion to inmate rehabilitation. However, this does not mean that the problem of overcrowded prisons wll be solved with the initiation of project RESTART. Maryland secretary of Public Safety and Corrections, Mary Ann Saar, told the Washington Times that the state has 3,000 inmates without real beds. Several prison expansion projects slated for 2005, including housing units in Cumberland and an addition onto the Baltimore County Detention Center should provide short-tem relief. Over time, it is hoped that getting nonviolent offenders out of the prison system will help alleviate the overcrowding.
Other states should follow Maryland’s example, and create or expand statewide programs for rehabilitating nonviolent criminals. Far too often these offenders get caught in a cycle of addiction and desperation, and end up back in prison repeatedly. The nation’s correctional system has been overflowing since Reagan’s inception of the drug war. If anything, these programs should be supported for their ability to clear prisons of those who can become productive members of society.
Yet it is not all about efficiency and crowding. Nonviolent drug offenders should be seen as people with medical problems that need specific treatment. Governor Ehrlich shows through project RESTART that he understands this.
