California Reaped Large Savings by Diverting Drug-Using Offenders Into Treatment
A California law that allows qualified drug offenders to enter substance use treatment rather than go to jail or prison saved the state close to $100 million in its first year, NIDA-supported researchers report. Dr. M. Douglas Anglin and colleagues at the University of California, Los Angeles estimated that California spent an average of $2,300 less on each of 42,000 offenders who were adjudicated under its Substance Abuse and Crime Prevention Act of 2000 (SACPA; also known as Proposition 36) than it would have spent without the Act. The savings mainly reflected reduced spending on