Returning Home Thesis

When certain populations are targeted for imprisonment, the same impoverished communities serve as pools of prisoners waiting for their actual sentence. For example, certain neighborhoods on the south side of Chicago house some of the poorer people of Chicago, and often these areas are regarded as unsafe and have a problem with drug selling. The Returning Home project, led by Christy Visher in 2002, found that former prisoners from these types of communities were more likely to return to prison after serving their first sentence. Many of these poor communities are filled with racial minorities, reflected in the fact that 90 percent of all drug offenders in Illinois prisons were black in 1996, a number that hasn’t fallen much since (Street,

Once a remedy for this issue is implemented and shown to be effective in Chicago, a city that is still largely segregated by race and socioeconomic status, it could potentially become a widespread solution for racial bias and drug use in prisons across the United States. As we’ve seen, healthcare even while in prison is a human right, but in reality, prisoners may not be given access to appropriate care. Furthermore, those living in communities where prisoners are often pooled from due to profiling do not have affordable access to healthcare or education on the risks associated with drug use. These communities are poor with little funding for public education, causing the vicious cycle of imprisonment for nonviolent crimes such as drug use, return to the same community, and eventual return to prison as Visher (2002) found. To approach this problem, a type of altered “treatment as prevention” model, along with the mentioned harm reduction, could be put in place within these at-risk communities. Treatment as prevention is usually mentioned in regards to HIV treatment, where the antiretroviral therapy (ART) is administered to a sick person to treat their infection while also decreasing the transmission rate such that it prevents them from spreading the virus to others. ART will also prevent you from contracting HIV before exposure to the virus. The HIV treatment as prevention model is applicable to the drug offenses of prisoners because often HIV can spread through improper needle use when using and sharing intravenous drugs. However, the treatment as prevention model may be used on a broader scale as well, by treating the addictions seen in these communities to prevent them from engaging in what might be seen as a criminal offense. This broader “treatment as prevention” model should include four main creeds; the right to a harm reduction strategy to decrease