By Jeremy Duda | Arizona Mirror
About two dozen members of the public got their first chance to speak their mind at a legislative committee exploring reforms to sentencing and other aspects of Arizona’s criminal justice system, discussing the need for substance abuse treatment behind bars, the difficulty people face in finding housing and jobs after they get out of prison, and the boundaries of the reform legislation that advocates are planning for 2020.
At Monday’s hearing of the House Ad Hoc Committee on Earned Release Credits for Prisons, perhaps no issue came up more often than drugs and the impact they have on the criminal justice and correctional systems.
Tuesday Brauer who spent a collective eight and a half years behind bars through two sentences from crimes she committed to feed a methamphetamine addiction, estimated that 90 percent of the women she served time with at the Department of Corrections’ Perryville prison had some kind of substance abuse problem.
“I think that had I learned how to deal with my addiction, I probably wouldn’t have been so deep into the things that I was doing, stealing cars,” Brauer said.
While some speakers testified that they or loved ones ended up behind bars as a result of drug charges, others, such as Brauer, faced felony charges for other crimes they committed to feed drug habits.
