BOSTON – Clamping down on opioid drug abuse by limiting quantities of prescribed medication, requiring closer prescription monitoring and giving doctors greater power to hold patients for involuntary treatment are just some of the ways Gov. Charlie Baker wants to ease a crisis that has claimed thousands of Massachusetts lives in the past decade.
In a measure he introduced Thursday, Baker also would improve education targeting young people at risk of becoming abusers, move women committed for detoxification treatment into Taunton State Hospital and out of the Framingham state prison, and strengthen training for medical professionals involved in treatments using opioid drugs such as oxycontin and fentanyl.
The Justice Department has announced that it will begin releasing 6,000 "nonviolent" inmates from federal prisons starting at the end of this month. Welcome to the era of de-incarceration. At a conference named for former New York Mayor David Dinkins (who presided over the city at a time of runaway crime), Hillary Clinton decried the number of Americans behind bars and declared, "It's time to change our approach. It's time to end the era of mass incarceration."
In this, she is joined by Bernie Sanders and other Democrats, and also by Charles Koch, who wrote recently that "Overcriminalization has led to the mass incarceration of those ensnared by our criminal justice system, even though such imprisonment does not always enhance public safety. Indeed, more than half of federal inmates are nonviolent drug offenders." Sen. Rand Paul has called mass incarceration "the new Jim Crow." And Carly Fiorina suggested during the last debate, "We have the highest incarceration rates in the world. Two-thirds of the people in our prisons are there for nonviolent offenses, mostly drug-related. It is clearly not working."
