In 2020, Bill* was awaiting trial in a northern Georgia county jail when he asked his lawyer about getting into the Residential Substance Abuse Treatment (RSAT) program. His conviction had involved alcohol, and the program seemed like it’d be a good fit for him.
“I had been in county for two years, almost,” he told Filter. “And thought, because I was drunk at the time … that doing the program might lessen my sentence when I got to court.”
So his lawyer talked to the sheriff, and the sheriff moved him to the RSAT dorm.
Bill was motivated to change. He finished all the coursework and attended all the meetings. But he was surrounded by people who just needed to check the RSAT box to get their DUIs knocked down to time served, and he realized that was all the program existed to do.
“There were days in the program when I would be thinking about how … if I get the chance to start over I’ll live much differently,” he said, asked about what if anything he gained from RSAT. “I might not have even thought about all that if not for the program.”
So, where are you at now?
“I’m 60 years old being told to max out a 65-year sentence. I’m looking for a joint to smoke, is where I am now.”
Jail RSAT participants are a lot more excited to be there.
“The program was complete bullshit,” Ben*, who recently completed an RSAT program at a Georgia Department of Corrections prison, told Filter. “The only people who were trying to do anything positive were the ‘permanents’ of the facility, striving for good reports in their parole reviews.”
Ben is referring to the prisoners housed in RSAT facilities full-time. Most people there are just passing through, transferred in for the program and transferred back out less than a year later, but the “permanents” have been assigned as RSAT counselor assistants and may have an actual shot at parole.
In jail RSAT programs, the participants are usually excited to be there, relatively speaking at least. They have an incentive. Do well, and it could mean months shaved off their sentence. In prisons, where the sentences are much longer and the population turnover much lower, the incentive to complete RSAT would be boosting one’s chances of parole. Very few people in Georgia prisons have an incentive to complete RSAT.
RSAT programs prioritize people about to be released, so that they can be bridged to community-based services; it’s central to the federal funding for state prison RSAT programs. This is partly due to denial that there are drugs in prison and partly due to not considering communities inside prison worth investing in. The Bureau of Justice Assistance states that RSAT “encourages the establishment and maintenance of drug-free prisons,” but what it really encourages is the establishment and maintenance of a drug-using prison population.
At any prison or jail in the US you’ll probably find programs that administration is proud to say lowered recidivism—for a little while.
The people who tend to fill any new programs are the go-getters who always have one eye on the bulletin boards. They were already on the straight and narrow, but with any luck will get the chance to deliver a very sincere public testimony about how the program turned their life around, and be rewarded with early release. All the programs they participated in will have favorable success rates of producing successful graduates—measured in this case by urinalysis test—who could’ve gotten there on their own. Left out are many people who actually desperately want treatment because they are struggling with problematic substance use, and therefore are not good candidates for the program’s bottom line.
Pick any random prison or jail in the United States and you’ll probably find a rich history of programs that administration is proud to say successfully lowered recidivism—for a little while. New programs start with a bang, produce favorable statistics for three years or so, become mandated as a result of this success (or rather, as a result of various industry contracts needing to be renewed) and from there nose-dive until they’re discontinued. And replaced by some other shiny new program that will get industry contracts renewed, for a little while.
A lot of the mandated programs that are only successful on paper were genuinely successful in real life back when they were voluntary. Once administration begins yanking random people out of their routines, forcing them to attend something twice a week or else, the program is finished in terms of actual value.
The mentality that prisoners are incapable of change, and must therefore be changed by the state, begets the custom of giving credit to programs rather than people. In reality, RSAT grants would go further toward lowering recidivism if just divvied into chunks of cash handed to people on their way out the door. But then there would be no contracts to renew. RSAT funding can’t be used for anything else, so it’s not in its best interests to be too successful.
*Names have been changed to protect sources
Image (cropped) via Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation & Reentry/YouTube
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