Community Placement for Non-violent Offenders. Doing so would essentially bring state prisons down to their rated capacity. A comprehensive California study has found that every dollar spent on substance abuse treatment saved taxpayers over seven dollars in reduced crime and health care costs. Drug courts, where drug offenders are diverted to a special court docket for judicially supervised treatment, have been endorsed by the 1999 legislature. Recreation and similar community prevention programs have also been effective in lowering crime rates at relatively little expense.
Educational programs are important to crime prevention.
However, in 1991, for the first time in our history, U.S. cities spent more on law enforcement than on education. In-Prison and Released Prisoner Services. The after-care of prisoners, in which they are provided services to assist in their successful reestablishment in society, is often neglected and is critical to the reduction of recidivism. The criminal sentencing structure and its effect on the rate and cost of imprisonment in Washington State is complex and changing. Yet it is clear that dramatic increases in imprisonment and the cost of the criminal justice system in the last two decades have resulted from the change to a determinate sentencing system in which judges have reduced discretion as to the sentence imposed, together with the lengthening of sentences, the reduction of earned release time, and an increase in prosecutions, particularly for non-violent drug offenses, despite generally falling crime rates.