October 14, 2009
Prison Blues: Substance-abuse treatment at Donovan becomes a victim of state budget cuts
On Wednesday, Oct. 14, Mark Faucette, vice president of the Amity Foundation, a nonprofit substance-abuse-treatment provider, will be at Donovan State Prison in Otay Mesa, saying goodbye to the roughly 500 inmates currently enrolled in Amity's Right Turn program. The highly regarded program, held up as a national model for effective prisoner rehabilitation, is being closed down, a casualty of state budget cuts.
Last week, Elias Contreras, the prison's associate warden, told a KPBS reporter that Right Turn would be replaced with a 90-day detox program. That's actually not the case: California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation spokesperson Peggy Bengs confirmed for CityBeat on Tuesday that Donovan is one of eight prisons statewide that won't provide any sort of professional in-custody substance-abuse treatment. Rather, those facilities will rely entirely on outside volunteers from programs like Narcotics Anonymous and inmates who've been trained as substance-abuse counselors…
LINK - SDCityBeat.com
