Oct 24, 2018 By Harry Funk staff Writer hfunk@thealmanac.Net 4 min read

Among the multitude of entities attempting to mitigate the negative effects of drug and alcohol use, the agency headed by John Wetzel is uniquely positioned.

“In America, when we deal with substance abuse, we look at it through a criminal justice lens,” he said. “So your criminal justice system is as engaged in addiction as any system we have.”

As secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections, Wetzel oversees the confinement, care and rehabilitation of approximately 47,000 inmates at state correctional facilities.

More than three-quarters of the inmates have some type of substance abuse disorder, he said, and that’s far from coincidence.

“As we know, individuals with addiction often get involved in other crimes to feed that addiction,” he told the audience at an Oct. 18 substance abuse forum organized by state Rep. Dan Miller, D-Mt. Lebanon, and held at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church.

Under Wetzel’s leadership, the corrections department has seen a decline of 8 percent in the state prison population since 2012, and with that has come a drop in the crime rate that correlates with a Pew Charitable Trusts study showing similar results across the nation.

“That doesn’t imply causation,” Wetzel explained. “It just implies that we can address criminal justice issues in a way that doesn’t necessarily involve incarceration at the state level, and still have good outcomes as it relates to crime. And I think there’s not a more relevant area than addiction issues.”

To that objective, his department provides testing for education, mental health and addiction within three months of an inmate entering the system, subsequently providing individualized treatment plans based on their needs.

Pull Quote

“At the end of the day, you pay $42,000 for each individual in my system. It would be cheaper to send them to Pitt.” – John Wetzel

“Our goal is that people leave our system better than they came in,” he said. “Frankly, we don’t achieve nearly as much as we should. But I think it’s really important that when we have somebody with us, we do something to change their trajectory.”

A focus of Gov. Tom Wolf’s administration has been to integrate community resources with those provided by the corrections department as a means to help prevent recidivism following an inmate’s re-entry to the general population.

Along with that comes an emphasis on resources aimed at keeping individuals from landing in jail in the first place. An example Wetzel cited is providing more opportunities for early childhood education, which in turn leads to better reading levels, lower dropout rates and, by extension, fewer cases of incarceration.

“If you want to talk about crime prevention, it’s that kind of forward thinking,” he said. “I think it’s really about getting more proactive and funding stuff to keep people out of the system altogether. We’re not going to just arrest our way out of this opioid epidemic.”

As for the source of such funding:

“The state should float a couple-of-billion-dollar bond issue, and let’s build a real behavioral health system. Let’s put resources in the community, and that will pay off down the road,” Wetzel asserted. “Not having a behavioral infrastructure – drug and alcohol, mental health – I think that is the root cause for all of this, and that has to be the answer.”

That also represents a formidable challenge, he conceded.

“Long-term thinking oftentimes is the next election,” he said about motivations regarding government expenditures. “And if we’re looking for a two-year return on investment or a four-year return on investment, we’re not going to fund programs that result in cost avoidance 10 or 15 years from now.”

But perhaps doing so would make sense within the context of the state prison system’s current costs.

“At the end of the day, you pay $42,000 for each individual in my system,” Wetzel said. “It would be cheaper to send them to Pitt.”