Drug use and crime have long gone hand in hand. Roughly 30 percent of California’s inmates were arrested for violations of drug laws, like buying and selling narcotics, but the problem of drug use among the prison population goes much deeper. Regardless of the crime, about 80 percent of prisoners have struggled with substance abuse.

Extensive drug treatment certainly isn’t a panacea that will empty out the state’s prisons, but the current system doesn’t address the root problems behind a substantial portion of the state’s criminal activity - drug addiction and the emotional and psychological problems that go along with it.

Most inmates heading into California prisons on drug charges are offered rehabilitation but the success rate of these programs is strikingly low. Sixty-six percent of people leaving prison are rearrested within 3 years. It’s a revolving door where many of them enter prison addicted, leave prison addicted, and start using drugs again as soon as they return to their old neighborhoods and old lives.

In 2000, California voters passed Proposition 36, The Substance Abuse and Crime Prevention Act, which requires that first- and second-time nonviolent, simple drug possession offenders be offered treatment programs instead of jail time. The program has been proven to save the state money, $2.50 for every $1 invested, but it’s had a difficult time getting off the ground.

Approximately 38,000 people filter through the Prop 36 system annually. The expense of offering treatment to so many people totals roughly $108 million per year, with 90 percent of the funding coming from the state budget.

Funding cuts have already chopped the Prop 36 budget, and in June Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger proposed cutting funding for the law entirely. Schwarzenegger’s proposal was part of a package of spending cuts designed to make a dent in California’s budget deficit.

But for Prop 36, the issue gets a little trickier. The voters of California decided that not funding Prop 36 isn’t really an option. Even if state funds dry up entirely, California is still required by law to offer treatment to those eligible under the proposition’s rules. The bill for sending thousands of people through treatment will likely be passed down to the individual counties, most of which are already dangerously strapped for cash.

Proposition 36 is fighting for dollars at a time when the effectiveness of the law is under question. In 2007, UCLA researchers found that only 34 percent of people who begin treatment with Proposition 36 actually finish it. The California Department of Alcohol and Drug Programs puts the number at 42 percent. But for those who do finish treatment, four in 10 have new drug arrests within 30 months.

But the huge number of people taken in by Prop 36 still means that thousands fewer drug dependent offenders are filling the state’s prisons.

One area of the state’s rehabilitation program that seems to be on safe ground for now is the drug court system. Drug courts serve a much smaller population than Prop 36 but they’re increasingly filling the gap in the mission to shrink the number of drug offenders in the state’s prisons and jails.