If prisons were the answer to drug abuse, California would be a drug-free paradise by now. Yet it leads the country in drug abuse rates. Now a new initiative on the November ballot proposes a radically different approach. PNS commentator Vincent Schiraldi is Director of the Justice Policy Institute located in San Francisco and Washington, D.C.

Some new data was released this month that questions whether the "War on Drugs" has been successful in reducing either drug use or violent crime.

California has fought the drug war like no other state in the country over the past 20 years. Nationally, from 1980 to 1998, while the number of persons sent to prison for violent crimes doubled, the number of persons imprisoned for drug offenses increased 11-fold. As massive an increase as that is, it is dwarfed by California's where the number of prisoners locked up for drug offenses increased 25-fold during the same time. California now imprisons its citizens for drug offenses at twice the national average.

To make matters worse, while California used to incarcerate several times as many prisoners for drug sales and manufacturing as for possession, there are now more persons imprisoned for simple possession as for selling and manufacturing drugs.

If prisons were the answer to drug abuse, California would be a drug-free paradise by now. Yet California has the highest drug abuse rate in the country. A recent study released by the Justice Policy Institute found that, of California's 12 largest counties, those that imprisoned more drug offenders did not experience less drug use or less violent crime. For example, Riverside County's drug possession imprisonment rate is 500% greater than Contra Costa's is; yet the violent crime rate in Contra Costa County is 30% lower.

This year, Californians actually have something they can do about both drug abuse and the overuse of imprisonment for non-violent drug addicts. Proposition 36, the Substance Abuse and Crime Prevention Act, would divert persons convicted of drug possession -- not dealers and not those with violent priors -- from prison into mandatory treatment.

The non-partisan Legislative Analyst's Office estimates that the measure would save the state between $100 million to $150 million a year in unneeded prison costs. In addition, counties would save $50 million a year in jail costs, and there would be one-time savings of $500 million in prison construction costs. The initiative requires these generated savings to fund increased drug treatment programs through the establishment of an annual $120 million drug treatment superfund.