Prisons: Senate gives the green light to a bill on home detention for drug and alcohol addicts

The Senate plenary session has approved, by a show of hands, the government-sponsored bill containing provisions on home detention for prisoners with drug or alcohol addictions who are participating in a rehabilitation programme. The measure, which was given the green light on Wednesday 10 June, provides for a specific form of home detention and a procedure for early settlement of the case based on participation in treatment programmes.

The legislative measure – as stated in the explanatory memorandum to the approved text – is aimed at achieving two objectives: on the one hand, to expand the group of individuals, sentenced to a term of imprisonment and with a confirmed diagnosis of drug or alcohol addiction, who can access treatment, detoxification and rehabilitation programmes outside prison facilities; on the other, to relieve the constant overcrowding in prisons, thereby meeting both the rehabilitation and social reintegration needs of prisoners and providing better living conditions for the remaining prison population.

To this end, the approved text has chosen to structure the measure in a manner analogous to the legislative instrument that already provides for an alternative to imprisonment for those who, having been served with an order to enforce a sentence that has become final, intend to undergo or are undergoing (and intend to continue) a therapeutic rehabilitation programme, assisted by local health services and with the aid and support of facilities for the treatment and diagnosis of conditions related to drug addiction. The ‘model’ provision is therefore Article 94 of the Consolidated Law on Narcotics, which governs the institution of ‘probationary placement in specific cases’.

This provision forms part of the framework of alternatives to imprisonment and complements other types of measures designed to allow sentences to be served through alternatives to imprisonment within a prison. The provisions introduced, however, differ significantly from that model, as they constitute a form of sentence enforcement that is non-prison-based but still custodial (house arrest in designated therapeutic facilities), subject to conditions set out in the two articles proposed for inclusion in the Consolidated Act on Narcotics, and with outcomes dependent on the success of the therapeutic programme in terms of effective rehabilitation.