Glasnik Advokatske komore Vojvodine (Jan 2015)
Substance abuse in the population of offenders
Abstract
Official data of the relevant institutions in the country and the world has testified about a higher frequency of psychoactive substance abuse among offenders, particularly among the convicts to a prison sentence. According to the Ministry of Justice of the Republic of Serbia, the number of alcoholics and drug addicts among the prisoners has continued to grow from year to year. In this regard, a particularly vulnerable category is the category of persons sentenced to imprisonment. In our country, over 70% of those who are serving sentences are addicts, and of that percentage, 50% are drug addicts. In European prisons, proportion of individuals who use drugs in the total prison population is 20-70%, and in the USA it is 70-80%. Correlation between psychoactive substance and crime is not easy to define because of the specific and complex interaction effect of drugs as a cause of crime. Chronology of the emergence of criminal behavior provides a useful framework for organizing research on the relationship between the drug use and criminal behavior.
