Premium ContentMouse over Home then click on Premium Content for information.The streets of Nebraska and Iowa will soon be seeing the early return of hundreds of men and women convicted of crack cocaine offenses.
This thanks to the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010 which, in broad terms, deemed that thanks to 1980s-era federal laws, those convicted of crack-cocaine-related crimes were given much more prison time than those convicted of crimes related to similar drugs, particularly crack's cousin, powered cocaine.
Scared?
Do you imagine crackheads running amok? A return to the violence and "crack babies" of the 1980s?
Kerry Black Wiles and other area drug counselors worry about the freed inmates.
But their focus is how society will go about helping these former addicts stay clean.
"The biggest concern is that you'll have people coming out of prison and walking right back into the environment from which they came," said Wiles, a clinical supervisor with Heartland Family Service in Council Bluffs who last week was named the 2011 outstanding clinician by Addiction Professional.
"One of the keys for them will be to avoid, as we say, 'your same playmates, your same playgrounds,'" she said. "These are part of the skills we try to teach in recovery programs. The trick will be to make sure we continue to work with the judicial and corrections system to get those coming out on drug-related charges into the right kinds of treatment programs.
"Those inmates will go on parole, they will be monitored, and during that time, we'll work to give them the skills to stay clean and make lives for themselves."
Don Winkler, a social services consultant who spent nine years as a police officer in a suburb of Chicago, remembers those years in the 1980s when crack cocaine became the prime focus on the then-new war on drugs. The rampant violence was real, he said.
"I know why the crackdown happened," Winkler said. "But then a sort of hysteria was added to it. It seemed like the idea of all these 'crack babies' just drove the sentences up and up.
"What you see now is that it targeted a particular community and it targeted the poor because it (crack) was cheaper than the cocaine being used by those with more money. The sentencing got all out of whack."
The very fact that crack was typically a drug of impoverished minorities could cause unique problems for those returning to the streets after crack-related prison time. Both Winkler and Wiles, like many drug counselors in the region, now focus on not only the drug use of a patient but also the mental health issues and personal traumas that so often accompany drug abuse.
Both counselors discussed their use of "co-occurring treatments."
"The world of crack cocaine use itself is a rough world," Wiles said. "Difficult life situations can lead you into that world, the world itself can batter people with all sorts of traumatic experiences.
"The drug's culture almost ensures that there are emotional problems that need to be addressed to help keep someone from using again."
It can be argued that, Draconian or not, the crackdown on the drug drove "it down the list of drugs we see being abused," Wiles said.
Now, in Iowa and Nebraska, Winkler and Wiles said, meth, the use of which generally carries far smaller sentences than crack, is king.
"Meth is just by far the drug of choice, the stimulant of choice," Winkler said. "That is the biggest enemy for everyone in this area right now."
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