Chris Christie on Illegal Drugs

Call for Reform

In November of 2011, Governor Christie was speaking on reforms to the prison and drug system that were intended to reduce recidivism rates. He stated that while the war on drugs was well intentioned, incarceration was not the only method to address the drug problem.

Listen, the people who started the war on drugs had the best of intentions, and I'm not in any way denigrating their intentions or what they tried to do, and that there haven't been some successes because there has. But, I think that we need to to much different and much better than what we've done. And I don't believe that the only weapon that we use agains the drug problem is incarceration.I just don't think it's worked ... and I think that we see it over and over again that it hasn't.

Does there have to be an element of incarceration? Absolutely. Especially for violent offenders. Understand that everything that I am talking about here is for nonviolent offenders. You commit an act of violence, then you're gonna have to go to the back of the line because we can't be rewarding people who engage in violence.

But our experience tells us that there are a lot of folks who are nonviolent drug offenders who are spending a lot of time in our county and state prisons and not being treated for the underlying addiction thats' the problem that drives their continued involvement in crime.

 

Support for Mandatory Treatment

In July of 2012, Governor Christie gave a speech at the Brookings Institute in which he stated that he supported legislation that recently passed the New Jersey Legislature which mandated a year of treatment for first-time, nonviolent drug offenders instead of jail time.

The war on drugs, while well-intentioned, has been a failure. We're warehousing addicted people everyday in state prisons in New Jersey, giving them no treatment.

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It costs us $49,000 a year to warehouse a prisoner in New Jersey state prisons last year," Christie said. "A full year of inpatient drug treatment costs $24,000 a year.

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