I agree with Laurie Loisel of the Northwestern District Attorney’s Office that language can be stigmatizing (“Language matters,” Sept. 24). And so do actions.
Words such as “substance use disorder” undermine the current thinking of health researchers and practice by mental health and mental health providers. They believe that people struggling with substance misuse need treatment rather than incarceration.
Therefore, it is way past time for prosecutors to use every possible non-carceral alternative to not criminalize people whose crimes are driven by substance misuse. At the Hampden County jail, men who have committed no crime are incarcerated solely because they have been civilly committed under Section 35. Massachusetts is the only state in the country that does this.
We must start disinvesting in jails. Jails alone in Massachusetts cost taxpayers more than a half a billion dollars a year to incarcerate approximately 10,000 women and men. More than half are there only because they are too poor to make even $200 in bail. Almost all are there because of substance misuse.
Try to imagine what even half of our current spending on locking people up in jails at $250 million a year would mean for community-based treatment on demand for the lives of our neighbors and our loved ones.
Lois Ahrens
Northampton
The writer is the founding director of the Real Cost of Prisons Project, a national organization based in Northampton.