Why Are So Many Addicts Repeat Offenders?
Have you ever wondered about repeat offenders? It is not uncommon to hear about folks who get in legal trouble for using drugs or alcohol, and instead of remaining sober, they go back out and use again. It is difficult to understand how someone can keep engaging in the same behavior after losing everything. Repeat offenders are often called selfish and ungrateful. But what if the opposite is true? What if repeat offenders need compassion just like everyone else?
My Repeat Offender History
In 2012, I got arrested for driving under the influence (DUI) of alcohol. My second DUI charge happened a few years later, in 2015. Between the ages of 23 and 28, I was arrested five times and admitted to inpatient treatment or rehab six times. For a decade, I was a chronic repeat offender. As soon as I left treatment or finished probation, I immediately drank again.
Each time I got in trouble, the consequences harshened. Instead of receiving holistic, evidence-based, compassionate care for a life-threatening condition, I received criminalization. The shame that I felt for struggling snowballed along with the punishments. I didn't think my life could get better. I couldn't escape a nagging inner monologue that said I was nothing more than an alcoholic loser who couldn't trust herself.
I was a repeat offender because I couldn't deal with the shame. Even with two college degrees, having a criminal record and no driver's license means I can't pass a background check. Only entry-level jobs tolerate criminal, repeat offenders like me. How could I survive and pay tens of thousands of dollars in student and legal debt while making minimum wage? How was I supposed to stand back up while being held underwater?
Repeat Offenders Have Been Harmed and Need Help
I got addicted to alcohol because I was living with unprocessed trauma. It does not make sense to meet traumatized humans with handcuffs. Repeat offenders are battling addiction in a system that actively works against them. It's no wonder my 20s were such a nightmare.
If I learned anything during my 20, it is that punishment does not lead to abstinence. My relationship with alcohol didn't change until I found a community steeped in love. They told me, for the first time, there was no need for fixing because I was not broken. I know it's hard to love and understand someone who struggles with repeat offenses. But trust me when I say we are not doing it to cause harm. We are doing it because we've been harmed and need help keeping our heads above water.
APA Reference
Cronkright, K.
(2023, September 4). Why Are So Many Addicts Repeat Offenders?, HealthyPlace. Retrieved
on 2024, December 17 from https://www.healthyplace.com/blogs/debunkingaddiction/2023/9/why-are-so-many-addicts-repeat-offenders
Author: Kelsi Cronkright
Too many ‘sober’ people still erroneously perceive drug addiction/addicts as simply being weak-willed and/or having committed a moral crime.
Yes, international and domestic merchants of the drug-abuse/addiction scourge must be targeted for long-overdue political action and criminal justice. But western pharmaceutical corporations have intentionally pushed their own very addictive and profitable opiate resulting in immense suffering and overdose death numbers yet got off relatively lightly and only through civil litigation.
Though sympathetic, I used to look down on those who had ‘allowed’ themselves to become heavily addicted. Yet I myself have suffered enough unrelenting PTSD symptoms to have known, enjoyed and appreciated the great release upon consuming alcohol and/or THC.
Typically societally overlooked is that intense addiction usually doesn’t originate from a bout of boredom, where a person consumed recreationally but became heavily hooked on a self-medicating substance that eventually destroyed their life and even those of loved-ones.
More accurately: the greater the drug-induced euphoria or escape one attains from its use, the more one wants to repeat the experience; and the more intolerable one finds their sober reality, the more pleasurable that escape will likely be perceived. In other words: the greater one’s mental pain or trauma while sober, the greater the need for escape from reality, thus the more addictive the euphoric escape-form will likely be.
Especially when the substance abuse is due to past formidable mental trauma, the lasting solitarily-suffered turmoil can readily make each day an ordeal unless the mind is medicated.
Meantime, neglecting and therefor failing people struggling with debilitating addiction should not be an acceptable or preferable political, economic or religious/morality option. But the more callous politics and politicians that are typically involved with lacking addiction funding/services tend to reflect conservative electorate and representatives’ opposition, however irrational, against making proper treatment available to low- and no-income addicts.