Nevada officials are protesting a federal budget cut that eliminated money for a successful drug treatment program for prison inmates, reports the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
“I guess we’ll go back to warehousing inmates and not treating their drug problems,” said Jackie Crawford, director of the Nevada Department of Corrections.
Nevada received $616,138 last year under the Residential Substance Abuse Treatment program.
Officials said the program saved millions of dollars by treating inmate drug addictions and keeping prisoners from returning to jail. The money has been used to treat more than 1,500 inmates and has a 78 percent success rate, according to the Nevada Department of Corrections.
Money for the $7 million Justice Department grant program was stripped out of the year-end spending bill that the House passed on Dec. 8. The Senate will consider the bill in January.
The money was removed because the government “didn’t have a lot of spare cash,” said a spokesman for the House Appropriations Committee. The projected federal deficit next year is $480 billion.
Link: http://www.reviewjournal.com/lvrj_home/2003/Dec-17-Wed-2003/news/22817157.html