“Addiction: a compulsive need for and use of a habit-forming substance characterized by well-known physiological symptoms upon withdrawal.”

Merriam-Webster Dictionary

Maine, like the rest of America, is addicted to prisons. The only way we are going to beat this addiction is if we stop using our drug of choice – more prisons – for our current problem of prison overcrowding. The answer to prison overcrowding is fewer prisoners, not more prisons.

The principle reason our prisons are overcrowded is that jail time is our society’s preferred method of treating people who commit crimes primarily because they are addicted to drugs or alcohol, or are mentally ill. Half of all prisoners in America have these conditions as the primary problems that led to their crimes. If, as part of their sentences, we aggressively treated those prisoners for the illnesses they have instead of simply incarcerating them, and devoted more resources to treating these problems before they resulted in crimes, we would need fewer prisons, not more.

In recent discussions about running out of jail cells in Maine we have been doing just what addicts usually do when they run out of their drug – scramble desperately for more drugs. Recent proposals put forward as the answer to Maine’s prison overcrowding have primarily been ways of housing more prisoners, including sending state prisoners to county jails, outsourcing Maine’s prison overcrowding problem to other states by sending prisoners to a for-profit prison in Oklahoma, building a new prison in Cutler, and expanding the Charleston Correctional Facility.

But Maine has more than enough prisons; what is has is too many prisoners. There are currently more than 2,100 in Maine’s state prisons alone, a number projected to grow more than 20 percent in the next four years. In this regard Maine is like the rest of America which is why, by some estimates, Americans are the most imprisoned people in the world. According to California Prison Focus, America has 25 percent of the world’s prisoners but only 5 percent of its population. A record 7 million Americans, or one in 32 adults, was either in jail, on probation, or on parole at the end of 2005. More than 2.2 million Americans were in prison in 2005, up from 1 million in 1990. Drug charges account for 46 percent of total prison population growth since 1995, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.

There are many reasons we are addicted to prisons. These institutions are an apparently simple solution to the complex problem of crime, and it is certainly gratifying to just lock criminals up, out of sight and mind, and throw away keys. We are tired of being crime victims, and prison is a partial solution to our crime problems (despite growing evidence that education, jobs, drug treatment, and mental health treatment are more effective at reducing crime than prison time). We have used the courts and prisons as our main attack in the “war on drugs.”

The American private prison industry, which actively lobbies for laws that increase prison sentences and supports political candidates who are supposedly “tough on crime,” is increasingly influential in this country, and in Maine. It has a vested interest in using prisons as the only hammer to hit the nail of crime.

The same private prison company that owns the prison in Oklahoma to which Maine proposes sending some of its prisoners has contributed thousands of dollars to the political campaigns of Maine Gov. John Baldacci, 2006 Republican candidate for governor Chandler Woodcock, and the Maine State Legislature’s Criminal Justice Committee Chairman William Diamond, according to recent news stories. That company, Corrections Corp. of America, is the country’s largest private prison company, and it did not make political donations in Maine because it loves Mainers. It did so to buy access to Maine’s debate about its prison overcrowding problem, and you can bet it will not be lobbying for funding for programs such as drug courts and other alternatives to our prison overcrowding problem.

Withdrawal from addiction, as Merriam-Webster’s definition points out above, causes predictable withdrawal symptoms. In this case, withdrawal will result in claims that our crime rates will increase if we stop incarcerating so many people, that our leaders are going soft on crime and drugs, and that those of us who want this addict off this drug are addicted ourselves to smarmy liberal instincts to save souls. There will be accusations we want to empty our prisons, etc.

Rubbish. Finding alternatives to prison is a good, solid Maine type of idea, like selling bronzed moose poop to New Yorkers. It is common sense, and good economic sense, because we can no longer afford the expensive prison solution that does not work well as treatment programs for the mentally ill and drug addicted. In addition, we keep running out of prison space no matter how many costly prisons we build. Maine spent more than $140 million on prison construction in the late 1990s, and here we are again needing millions more for the same idea. We need a better idea this time.

Several other states, including our neighbors in Connecticut and Vermont, are well on their way to finding jail time alternatives to solve prison overcrowding because they, too, can no longer afford this prison addiction. A commission has been set up in Maine to look at prison overcrowding and is due to report back to the Maine Legislature in December; It will suggest many of the same solutions recommended by previous commissions that looked at the same problem (most recently in 2004). It should not recommend more prisons.

Unless we deny ourselves the easy, hugely expensive solutions of more prisons or exporting our prisoners, we are just going to keep snorting this drug of incarceration. Instead, we should put our money into innovative programs that keep the drug addicted and mentally ill out of jail unless there is no alternative, and save jails for those who truly need to be there. If we need more prison capacity in the short term it should be approved only until that time when we have kicked our addiction and found other solutions.

It’s time for us to get tough on this drug, and “Just say No!”

Erik Steele, D.O., a physician in Bangor, is chief medical officer of Eastern Maine Healthcare Systems and is on the staff of several hospital emergency rooms in the region.