The Natural History of Substance Misuse in an Incarcerated Criminal Population

Abstract

The natural history of substance misuse was explored in 343 medium security federal inmates. Of the subjects surveyed, 144 (42.0%) acknowledged a prior history of substance misuse, minimally defined as weekly ingestion of a psychoactive substance for a period of 3 or more months. Whereas the majority of subjects reported that they were abstinent due only to incarceration (57.4%), a quarter of the sample (24.8%) affirmed that they stopped using drugs on their own without treatment (spontaneous remission). Differences were observed between subjects who continued using or desisted only because of incarceration and subjects who displayed spontaneous remission. Several interpretations of this finding are possible, one being that subjects in the spontaneous remission group perceived themselves as having experienced significantly fewer problems as a consequence of drug use than subjects in the continued use and incarceration groups.