Jail for young adults
A reader asks about young adults who get into trouble and go to jail, and how not to let that screw up the rest of their lives?
One key to not letting jail screw up the rest of a life is to explain and emphasize that the person can never, ever drink or use other drugs again. To increase the odds of this, regular testing is never a bad thing.
Early in my 12 years of research and writing on alcoholism I was particularly struck by two comments in the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous. One was a lifer explaining he was in the pen because whiskey made him feel like he was God. Another said, if AA could be in every prison there’d be no need for them. While a bit of an exaggeration, considering that about 85% of convicts are alcohol or other-drug addicts, it’s not much of one.
I also listened early in my research to recovering addicts who said they now realized they triggered their alcoholism during their first drinking episode, when they now recognize it made them feel “powerful,” at an average age of 13. That’s long before most people decide what they will be when they grow up. If you happen to be particularly talented in acting, you become a Lindsay Lohan. If you grow up in the ghetto and suffer at the hands of a violent alcoholic father, you might become a street thug. (In other words, the form that addiction takes depends in part on environment and circumstances.)
So the key is to never use again. Prison doesn’t usually instill in inmates an understanding of this or even make the connection between incarceration and addiction. Until the criminal justice system forges the link, it’s incumbent on the rest of us to do so.