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Drugs & Substance Abuse in Corrections - Criminal Justice & Community Corrections

  • Stoughton Police gear up as risk from Fentanyl grows (2017)

    A bill recently introduced in the state Legislature would require police and first responders to don protective equipment before going anywhere near an overdose scene.

    STOUGHTON - Just a puff from the top of an evidence bag or a hand in the wrong place can be enough to put a police officer’s life at risk.

    Fentanyl, the synthetic opioid that’s become the driving factor behind the mounting deaths in the region’s opioid addiction crisis, has become such a risk to the first responders who race to try and save an overdose victim’s life or work to take down traffickers distributing...

  • How a Local Drug Diversion Program Is Trying to Break the Cycle of Addiction in Massachusetts (2017)

    In a guest article, the district attorney in Essex County, Massachusetts, details a local effort to offer treatment on demand to non-violent offenders rather than prosecuting them.

    SALEM, Mass. - Like many communities across the United States, the 34 cities and towns of Essex County, Massachusetts, have been battling a drug epidemic which claimed 193 lives last year. While the profile of the heroin user has changed; the outcome of heroin use has not. Heroin ruins lives and wreaks havoc on families and communities. No socio-economic group or community is immune from heroin’s devastation.

    In 2007, when the spike in...

  • Why this police department now needs to carry Narcan for dogs (2017)

    EVESHAM TWP -- Seeing the potential threat fentanyl exposure can pose to the K9s tasked with sniffing out illicit drugs, police here have equipped officers to treat dogs in the event of an overdose.

    Law enforcement officials have recently come to see that the opioid crisis is affecting not only the drug's users, but also police officers who are exposed to it through their line of work and may need doses of Narcan, a drug that combats the effects of opioids.

  • Using Organizational Strategies to Improve Substance Abuse Treatment for Probationers: A Case Study in Delaware (2015)

    NEARLY FIVE MILLION adults are under community supervision (i.e., probation or parole) in the United States (Maruschak & Parks, 2012). Many of them are placed under community supervision due to drug-related criminal offenses. According to the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (NCASA, 2010), approximately 70 to 85 percent of all convicted offenders have violated drug laws, were intoxicated at the time of the offense, committed the offense to support a drug habit, or have a history of drug addiction. Drug arrests have fluctuated over the last ten to fifteen years, but have remained fairly stable in overall arrest...

  • More Imprisonment Does Not Reduce State Drug Problems (2018)

    Nearly 300,000 people are held in state and federal prisons in the United States for drug-law violations, up from less than 25,000 in 1980. These offenders served more time than in the past: Those who left state prisons in 2009 had been behind bars an average of 2.2 years, a 36 percent increase over 1990, while prison terms for federal drug offenders jumped 153 percent between 1988 and 2012, from about two to roughly five years.

    As the U.S. confronts a growing epidemic of opioid misuse, policymakers and public health officials need a clear understanding of whether, how, and to...