The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog: War on Drugs Victimizes Women

The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog: War on Drugs Victimizes Women


October 10, 2006
War on Drugs Victimizes Women

War on Drugs victimizes women
By LOIS AHRENS
Op-Ed- Daily Hampshire Gazette, Northampton, MA
We live in Orwellian times. We are asked to believe that the peacekeeper missile delivers peace and declaring war on a nation will bring democracy.

Now Sally Van Wright, soon to be assistant superintendent of the Hampden County House of Correction, a new jail for women, states ''We incarcerate to set free.''

Despite the beliefs of jailers, when the public is polled, as they were in a study by Peter Hart (''Changing Public Attitudes Toward the Criminal Justice System,'' February 2002), they say incarceration cannot solve the deep social and economic problems that drive crime, nor is criminalizing addiction more viable than treating it as an illness.

Jailing women does not set them free. It also drains money from programs that could treat drug addiction, prevent and treat childhood sexual abuse, and fund quality education.