HARM REDUCTION AND PUBLIC TRANSPORT

Rien Klaassen and Jeannette Verveen look at an innovative way of reducing imprisonment of drug users in Rotterdam.

INTRODUCTION

The concept 'harm reduction' should not only mean the prevention or limitation of possible harmful consequences for the physical and mental health of those addicted to drugs, illegal or otherwise. Social workers for alcohol- and drugs-related problems should also take into consideration, and provide possible solutions for, the peripheral phenomena (such as homelessness) which are sometimes related to the use of intoxicants. This is part of a constant endeavour to reduce to a minimum the almost inevitable stigmatisation of addicts which some media appear to have made part of their goal. It is not only with the aim of helping the addicts, who do not benefit from endeavours, to impose on them a negative self-image, but also for the purpose of helping their social workers to formulate their work better in helping the client in the search for the answer to the question regarding the function of the use of drugs/alcohol in his or her own individual life. This article reports on a scheme to address some of these problems undertaken by the Boumanhuis, a large drug and alcohol agency in Rotterdam.

To facilitate complete understanding of the situation, it is first necessary to explain how the social safety net functions in the Netherlands and how public transport is organised.

SOCIAL SERVICES

Every person legally resident in the Netherlands has the right to income from the age of 18. Those who are employed receive this from their work, with a guaranteed legal minimum wage. Students can take advantage of so called study grants which guarantee them a certain degree of independence from parents or other guardians. The unemployed receive income from one of a variety of social funds, created from public money and in the form of compulsory insurance, depending on their work history or reason for unemployment among other things. Here again there is a guaranteed minimum which is substantially lower than the minimum wage and which verges on the minimum needed for food, clothes and housing.

The Dutch opiate addict, as identified in the statistics, and this will be the case if he is registered with social workers, is on average over the age of 30, and in three out of four cases a man; is generally speaking unemployed; often has no work history to speak of and, as a result, has an income within the framework of the Social Security Act. This Act provides the basic social security payments. At the present time the social security benefit amounts to Dfl. 1200 a month. The benefit is annually adjusted to the level of inflation. This has been accompanied by growing political debate as a result of the fact that the demands on the social services are on the increase.

This annual adjustment to the minimum subsistence level gives people receiving benefit a certain degree of security because they know where they stand and how they need to organise their financial lives to keep their heads above water in the long term. The average net income in the Netherlands amounts to more than double the benefit paid within the framework of the Social Security Act. It is therefore clear that those entitled to a benefit belong to the lowest level of society, in financial terms at least.

PUBLIC TRANSPORT

Rotterdam has a fine-meshed public transport system and consists of train, tram, bus and metro. In the train and bus, travellers are systematically checked- by the ticket inspector and driver respectively - on every journey to see if they are in possession of a valid ticket. However, most local journeys take place by tram and metro and in these forms of transport there is no check on every journey. Checking is carried out on a random basis by teams of ticket inspectors who appear unexpectedly in trams or metros, at irregular times and always stepping in at a different stop on the route. Nevertheless, those travelling without a ticket have relatively little chance of getting caught.

During a period of one month, for example, the authors made regular use of the tram and metro without being checked to see if they had a ticket, i.e. if they had not paid a single time during the past month for the transport enjoyed, we would be considerably richer. As you can imagine, it is very attractive for those entitled to a benefit to take the risk and consequently keep their money in their pocket. Although the cost of public transport is not high compared with other necessities of life, if you have to make do with a low benefit every guilder counts.

If you are caught in the tram or metro - and once again the chance is small from a statistical point of view and is estimated at around 5 % - the ticket inspector asks you to pay a fine of Dfl.64.25 on the spot, which is many times more than the amount it would have cost if you had simply paid for your journey. If you do not wish to or cannot pay the fine on the spot, you are given a week to pay it directly at one of the sales outlets of the transport company. If you fail to do so, the transport company will make a further attempt to collect payment - with an extra charge of Dfl.25 per fine, bringing the total fine to Dfl.89.25, by sending an accept Giro slip.

If this effort by the transport company to collect payment also fails, the case is handed over to the Public Prosecutor. This often leads to the cantonal judge (responsible for dealing with 'petty' crime) imposing a fine of at least Dfl. 105 or 2 days imprisonment. An accept Giroslip to be paid by a specific date is then sent to the home address, if known, but now by the Ministry of Justice instead of the transport company. If this request for payment is not complied with, the person eventually has to spend 2 days' in prison. Unfortunately for the Ministry of Justice, the Dutch public is only too aware that the cell capacity of the prisons is inadequate to accommodate even the real criminals. Consequently a considerable number of those receiving such an accept Giro slip will fail to respond at all, in the belief that nothing is likely to be done.

They are often quite right, although the Ministry of Justice does from time to time suddenly take action, by way of a deterrent, and hauls the biggest offenders out of their beds to sit out their sentence. Another disadvantage of non-payment of fines is that it is reported on your personal record and this means that when you are checked at air traffic border-crossings, you may suddenly be confronted with confiscation of your travel documents until you have paid.

These are all measures which have little effect in a preventive sense on those who are constantly asking themselves whether they will make the end of the month or not from a financial point of view, because they are too far ahead in the future.

The 'tit for tat' element whereby undesirable behaviour is immediately linked to unpleasant consequences for the offender is lacking in the range of measures to collect fines.

Among drug addicts who live by the motto 'don't worry about tomorrow', there is a large category of non-payers on trams and the metro and the percentage of drug addicts in the group that do not respond to an invitation to pay the fine is relatively high. The group of people who take the risk, consciously or otherwise, also comprise a large number of psychiatric patients, living outside mental hospitals, tramps and others on the fringe of society. In Rotterdam the number of fare-dodgers is estimated at less than 1.5% of the total of passenger journeys. The percentage here of notorious fare-dodgers is so high that it was decided several years ago to reserve 33 cells for them in Rotterdam's prison, in spite of the previously mentioned shortage of cell capacity.

These cells are permanently occupied by the most notorious fare-dodgers who fail to pay the fine. As a cell costs approximately Dfl.250 a day, the costs involved in reserving 33 cells on an annual basic amount to Dfl.3 011 250. In addition you have the cost of tracing the person, administration, arrest and prosecution which will not amount to much less. The Municipal Transport Company (RET) is quite understandably constantly trying to think of ways to tackle fare-dodging, if only from cost considerations. They were consequently pleasurably surprised when a proposal was put forward from a totally unexpected source, the Boumanhuis, an institution for the care of addicts, to do 'something' about fare-dodging by drug addicts.

THE PROPOSAL

The Boumanhuis, located in a street called Baan, Rotterdam, runs, among other more high threshold programmes, a maintenance methadone programme where 280 customers come so drink or collect their methadone daily, except for Saturday and Sunday. Baan also enjoys a certain fame because it was here that the idea was conceived for the needle-exchange machine, and it was also here that the first computerised methadone dispensing system in the Netherlands was developed and installed. The Baan methadone programme staff see approximately 600 people annually. The Baan methadone programme a 30 seconds' walk from a metro station and as most its customers do not have their own transport, such as a bicycle or car, it is obvious that they will travel there by metro.

The number of fare-dodgers is high among the Baan population. The staff gather this from the methadone customers themselves who tell/complain to the about yet another fine, and also from the period absence of programme customers because another series of offenders have to 'pay for' their fines in prison

Another observation on the part of the staff was that at Leuvehaven metro station, near Baan, considerably more checks were being made on fare-dodging than at other metro stations. The transport company inspectors obviously also knew that a considerable number of drug addicts left the metro at that specific station and found it a good opportunity to catch fare-dodgers by frequently checking passengers there.

Not that charges make any impression on most of these addicts, in view of the lack of the 'tit for tat' element. The only risk to them - or at least in their perception at the time - is the possibility of arriving too late for the methadone and not being able to get it. 4 But, for whatever reason, this is often not a sufficient deterrent. We are talking here about the 'planners', in \ other words those who more or less consciously calculate the riskofbeing caught.There isalso anothercategory consisting of those who at the specific moment - i.e. just before stepping into the metro - have no money to buy a ticket because their priorities for spending their money lie elsewhere.

As we have already mentioned, most drug addicts are unemployed and therefore receive a benefit which is usually paid by the local Social Services. 'Normall people who make frequent use of public transport usually buy a monthly or annual season ticket for convenience and to save money. The cheapest monthly season ticket is Dfl .48 .7 5 and this allows you unlimited travel within one zone.

If the drug addict who comes by metro every day to collect methadone were to buy a ticket every day, it would cost him more than Dfl.52 a month. This repre sents approximately 5% of the benefit which is only used to collect methadone and is therefore quite separate from other journeys which may (need to) be made.

It would seem natural then for the drug addict also to buy a monthly season ticket, at least if he or she is a citizen who plans ahead. In practice this is not the case and the addict chooses to dodge paying the fare, i.e. until the Boumanhuis came up with the idea of letting the customers pay for the season ticket themselves, but in a different way than is normally the case.

If a customer wants an annual season ticket for one zone it would cost ten times the price of a monthly season ticket. First of all he or she would go to an RET sales outlet to collect an application form, then fill in a number of details on this form and take it back to the sales outlet, together with a recent passport photo, then pay the first instalment of Dfl.48.75 and sign a declaration to the bank to authorise the RET to deduct monthly a further nine times Dfl.48.15 from a bank account.

It will be obvious from this why many drug addicts do not have an annual season ticket. The first stumbling block is collecting an application form, the second is having a passport photo taken, the third is taking the form and photo back, and the biggest obstacle of all is paying Dfl.48. 75 in one go. Most of the agency's customers have a weekly benefit of around Dfl.200 and for most of them it is a major problem to keep enough money in their pocket from payment to payment for the most essential things such as food and accommodation.

The Baan team approached the RET and the Social Services to ask if both organisations were interested in an experiment in which:

The Social Services would have to take on extra [ work by - instead of the customers making payments directly to the RET - withholding that amount from the benefit and making these payments monthly in a batch.

They hesitatingly replied 'yes' because there was considerable doubt as to whether the customers would agree to cooperate, and if they did so they would probably either lose the tickets or, even worse, sell them. Eventually it was decided that instead of 10 months (½ Dfl.48, the Baan customers could pay a weekly amount of Dfl.9.37 (Dfl.480 divided by 52 weeks). After being authorised to do so by the customer, the Social Services could deduct this amount from the benefit and pay this to the RET monthly. The Baan staff would take over all RET counter transactions and would carry out a recruitment campaign among the customers. This meant that they would use the methadone programme, talks and posters to point out the attractive conditions whereby they could obtain a public transport season ticket.

If a customer wanted a season ticket, he could sign an authorisation for the Social Services in the methadone programme and later hand in his or hex passport photo. The customers who did hand in the authorisation but not the passport photo were regularly warned to do so and, if that failed to help, one of the Baan staffeventually went with him or her to the passport photo machine . Once the Social Services and the RET have processed all the authorisations and applications, the Baan organisation then issues the annual season tickets to its customers.

The experiment was intended for 50 drug addicts and there was a mad rush! Within a few weeks all the available tickets were sold and the first customers

travelled proudly through the city with their season ticket. After a trial period of 3 months, none of the negative things anticipated by the RET and Social Services occurred. Obviously a ticket was occasionally lost, but this proved to be no higher than in the case of the ordinary general public. The project has now been in operation for almost 4 years and there has only been one case of fraud. The experiment was therefore converted into a project.

At the present time 120 drug addicts participate in the project and most of them extend their season ticket annually. A total of 160 drug addicts have taken part in the project; 70% of them were known to the RET as notorious fare-dodgers, and this is now a thing of the past for most of this group.

The advantages of the project are evident:

Fare-dodging is substantially reduced and consequently also the costs involved.

The drug addict can make use of public transport with no qualms and will in future no longer be usually unexpectedly - threatened with several weeks in prison as a result of oustanding fines.

The aggression which often accompanies charges at the station or in the metro and which forms an annoyance for both inspectors and the travelling public is reduced.

The advantages are there to be seen by everyone 'harm reduction' that can be understood by all.

CONCLUSION

The Boumanhuis enjoyed developing this project and feels that it has been more than rewarded for its efforts. In the first place, the national and local media have reported extensively and positively on the project (and implicitly also on the drug addicts participating in the project), crowned by a 30-minute report on national television. Second, the project was nominated (and rewarded with a sum of money) for the Hein Roethof price, an annual prize awarded to the best project related to combating petty crime.

The project is now 4 years old and continues to operate with great success. It is estimated that as the result of a planned re-organisation of drug services in Rotterdam in 1995, the capacity of the programme could be as many as 600.

Rien Klaassen and Jeannette Verveen, Boumanhuis, Essenlaan 16, 3062NM Rotterdam, The Netherlands.