When the Wall Street Journal endorses the growing shift from mass incarceration to rehabilitation and diversion programs, something is in the wind.  But let’s not pop the champagne corks too quickly.  Politicians are beginning to understand that long prison terms for drug offenses have failed to deter drug abuse or the illegal drug trade.  Furthermore, prisons, even if run on the cheap, are unspeakably expensive.  All of this is good.

Mass incarceration is primarily a function of the war on drugs, a slash and burn campaign that–its own propaganda notwithstanding–was never about getting drugs and drug dealers off the streets.  The drug war is about social control.  When a nation turns its back on its poorest citizens (as American did in late 197os) bad things are bound to happen.  Desperate people take desperate measures.  Those with little access to legitimate work will turn to illegitimate work–like selling drugs.  Middle class addicts can fund their habits, but poor addicts sling drugs and commit property crime to keep the supply flowing.  Entire neighborhoods become economically dependent on the trade in illegal drugs even as they are afflicted by unbearably high crime rates. 

We faced a choice back in the day.  We could either address the economic issues facing poor people of color, or we could use the illegality of the drug trade as a pretext for placing poor neighborhoods on lock down, transforming them into virtual police states complete with informants, arbitrary stops and searches, official corruption and arbitrary arrest.

We made the second choice.  The drug war allowed us to sidestep the consequences of poverty.  The prison-building boom created employment opportunities in cash-strapped communities in the American hinterland.  For a while, it worked (at least if you were white and middle class).

Now, with municipal, state and federal budgets tight, politicians are backing away from the foundational principles of mass incarceration.  This is very good news; but we still have no response to the economic distress that spawned the drug war in the first place. 

Rehabilitation is clearly a better response to addiction and non-violent drug crime than insanely long prison terms, no question.  But we still have no jobs for these people.  The fast food industry is always hiring, of course, but folks who have been in the system need not apply.  At the same time, we are erecting walls between indigent students and vocational training.

In other words, we’re still moving in the wrong direction, but our pace has slowed considerably and we are walking with a noticable limp.  An honest confrontation with social reality will require repentance and a renegotiation of the social contract.

States Rethink Drug Laws

Treatment Gains Favor Over Long Prison Terms; a New Look at Rehabilitation.

By NATHAN KOPPEL And GARY FIELDS

A growing number of states are renouncing some of the long prison sentences that have been a hallmark of the war on drugs and instead focusing on treatment, which once-skeptical lawmakers now say is proven to be less expensive and more effective.

Kentucky on Thursday became the latest to make the shift when Gov. Steve Beshear signed into law a measure increasing spending on rehabilitation programs and intensive drug testing. The law also reduces penalties for many drug offenses and may allow some traffickers and users of smaller amounts of drugs to avoid prison.

Delaware, Florida, Indiana, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania are among those that have pending bills to reduce penalties for drug offenders, in some cases by directing defendants into treatment programs. Similar laws have taken effect in South Carolina, Colorado and New York in recent years. States have maintained stiff penalties for more-serious drug crimes.

While the changes are part of broader belt-tightening efforts, they also reflect a growing belief among state lawmakers that prosecuting drug offenders aggressively often fails to treat their underlying addiction problems and can result in offenders cycling in and out of prisons for years—a critique long voiced by groups that advocate in favor of defendants’ rights.

“If you just throw everyone in jail, it’s terribly expensive and they get out and they are in the same boat,” said Tom Jensen, a Republican state senator in Kentucky who voted in favor of the law.

He said he had long “bought into the tough-on-crime concept” and adapting to a more rehabilitative model has been “an education process.”

Lawmakers, Mr. Jensen said, had access to data indicating that drug offenders are less likely to reoffend if they receive intensive community treatment in lieu of prison.

But others argue such changes send the wrong message.

“You need to have serious consequences or repercussions in place if people use heroin, Oxycontin” and other drugs, said Scott Burns, executive director of the National District Attorneys Association.

The Pew Center on the States, a nonpartisan group that advises on corrections and sentencing policy, assembles state-by-state data that it has shared with legislators. Pew presented research indicating some community supervision and treatment programs have significantly reduced recidivism rates for substance abusers and nonviolent offenders.

“We know so much more today than we did 30 years ago when we started down the prison-building path about what works to stop the cycle of crime and addiction,” said Adam Gelb, a senior policy analyst at Pew.

Some who have seen Pew’s figures, however, aren’t persuaded. “Crime will go up in five to 10 years and people will wonder why,” said Aaron Negangard, chairman of the Indiana Prosecuting Attorneys Council. “It’s because we are letting too many people out of prison.”

The state measures mark a sharp retreat from the war on drugs, which gathered steam in the 1980s and ’90s with mandatory-minimum and three-strikes prison sentences that resulted in some drug offenders being locked up for decades. Drug arrests nationwide climbed from about 580,000 in 1980 to about 1.6 million in 2009, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Although some states started rethinking drug punishment before the recession, many more states have come on board in the past two years.

In 2007, Texas began shifting more drug offenders away from prison, which helped hold down the inmate population. The changes cost $241 million, less than half what the state anticipated it would have spent to build three new prisons. The impact on the crime rate isn’t clear.

While putting offenders on probation is far cheaper than sending them to prison, the cost differences may narrow in states that plan to spend more on community-supervision and treatment programs.

Write to Nathan Koppel at nathan.koppel@wsj.com and Gary Fields at gary.fields@wsj.com