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TX: After 15 years, waiting list ends for prison drug treatment programs

By Real Cost of Prisons Project (The Sentencing Project)

After 15 years, waiting list ends for prison drug treatment programs New facilities helped curtail backlog. By Mike Ward AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF Wednesday, August 05, 2009 For the first time since the Texas prison system's substance-abuse treatment programs began nearly 15 years ago, amid controversy over their cost and effectiveness, programs have no waiting list, prison officials said Tuesday. In years past, thousands of drug- and alcohol-addicted convicts had to wait for months ? in some cases years ? for space to open up in the treatment programs, filling prisons with felons who could have been paroled, and confounding a smooth transition of convicts from prisons to programs to parole. But officials said that because the Legislature voted two years to ago greatly expand the treatment programs, the chronic backlog that had plagued them since their inception, at the behest of then-Gov...continue to full post

Full post as published by The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog on August 05, 2009 (boomark / email).