Decrying the Cook County Jail system as a socially bankrupt substitute for the help that most inmates really need, Rev. Jesse Jackson on Saturday unveiled an aggressive campaign to triple the number of drug-addiction treatment beds in and around Chicago.
However, he provided no specifics for funding sources.
“Treatment beds are cheaper than jail cells,” Jackson said during a forum at Operation PUSH headquarters on 50th Street in Hyde Park. “We need at least 2,000 more beds in Cook County.”
After the forum, Jackson held a news conference and vowed that organizers would take their case to Gov. Jim Edgar and Mayor Richard Daley-and if that failed, they would march in protest.
“Eighty percent of those in the jail either tested positive for drugs or (committed) a drug-related crime,” Jackson said. Yet Cook County Jail provides only 700 drug-treatment beds for its 9,500 inmates, he said.
The result, Jackson said, is that the jail has become nothing more than a breeding ground for criminal behavior, where the root causes of crime go untreated, and individuals who need help are released back onto the street even sicker and more streetwise.
“The way to expand crime is to release pent-up, untreated sick people onto the streets. . . . This is a very inefficient, high-expense, costly non-remedy,” Jackson said.
Jackson sought to bolster his case with the personal testimony of four recovering drug and alcohol addicts who said they languished in jail before finding the treatment they needed. All said that if they had not found treatment, they would have committed more crimes and ended up back in jail.
“When I first got locked up, I would dream that I was getting high,” said Vivian Morales, 28, of Chicago, who is undergoing residential treatment at Haymarket House, a 300-plus-bed facility on the Near West Side.
Morales said that she routinely would burglarize homes and sell the loot to finance her crack cocaine addiction. That continued, she said, until she was caught and sent to Cook County Jail in April. Morales said that despite the root of her problem, she received no treatment in the jail.
Months passed before a bed opened for her at Haymarket House, which has a waiting list of more than 350. Morales said she arrived there in late November and gave birth to a son about a month later.
Morales said that had she never found treatment, “My baby would have been an addict. I know I would have still been using. I would have been out there doing the same things I was doing before.”
Outside the jail, Chicago has 892 drug treatment beds, said Rev. James Meeks, the Illinois spokesman for the Rainbow Coalition who appeared at Jackson’s news conference. Yet there are 10,000 people on waiting lists for treatment, Meeks said.
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It costs the state about $16,000 a year to house an inmate. Yet for about $100 a day, Haymarket House can provide residential drug treatment, which typically lasts one to three months, according to Anthony Cole, deputy executive director. Such treatment can reduce the likelihood that a person will return to jail, Jackson said.
Jackson also proposed an education summit to address the learning deficiencies of jail inmates, of whom he said 92 percent are high school dropouts and 94 percent are functionally illiterate.
Organizers said the campaign to provide more drug-treatment beds will be a joint effort of Operation PUSH and the Rainbow Coalition and will commence in mid-January.