Earlier this year, with virtually no effort to study the problem or get the facts, the Loudoun Board of Supervisors abolished the county’s Drug Court, which provided alternative sentencing and treatment for nonviolent drug offenders.
It was a move sadly typical of the all-Republican Board that swept into office last January — its willy-nilly spending priorities have been driven by throwing huge amounts of money at politically favored pet projects, then scrambling to find cuts somewhere else in programs that don’t have a powerful constituency among the Loudoun Republican apparatchiks who put them in office. (The Board claimed the drug court was not “cost effective” at $280,000 a year — but did not even bother to compare that to the cost of imprisoning each offender sent to jail instead — which is $25,000 per year in Virginia.)
Today’s New York Times has an interesting article on the subject which notes that conservative scholars and politicians on a national level have realized it is simply madness to lock up nonviolent drug offenders; Continue reading
realloudoun 