Revolutionizing Addiction Treatment: Father Peter G. Young on Why the Sick Aren’t Criminals

Long before “treatment, not jail” was a slogan, Father Peter G. Young was standing in an Albany police courtroom saying it to anybody who would listen. In this clip from The Slingin Podcast on Hoodz Radio, he takes it back to the beginning, when there was no system to fix and he had to build one from scratch.

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Watch: “Revolutionizing Addiction Treatment in the 50s”, Father Peter G. Young on The Slingin Podcast, Hoodz Radio.

Father Peter G. Young died on December 9, 2020, at age 90. Kay Bond recorded this conversation with him for The Slingin Podcast on Hoodz Radio.

In His Words

“Don’t incarcerate — I see something in them. They’re sick. They’re not really criminal.”

That’s the whole argument in a few short lines. In his telling, the people being locked up for drinking weren’t criminals at all. They were sick, and they were “caught with the environment.” He says the governor backed him for one reason: “You’re changing the entire modality from crime to treatment.” Back then, that was a radical idea. As Father Young puts it, “we had to develop everything from the get go.”

From the Shelter Floor to the Governor’s Ear

The idea didn’t come out of a think tank. It came out of a gym in Albany’s South End. At his parish, St. John’s, hundreds of men slept on the gym floor of his shelter. At night, withdrawal hit hard: delirium tremens, convulsions, seizures. The next morning the same men were clear-headed and ready to talk over coffee. Watching that change is what set him on the path. He wanted to know why, and that question took him to the Yale School of Alcohol Studies.

Then the governor came to see for himself. Governor Nelson Rockefeller had been reading about what the papers called the “Harlem drug,” and he asked to visit Father Young’s shelter. The State Police let him walk into a typical evening: an overcrowded gym full of local guys who didn’t much care who had just walked in. One of the women there, Olivia, told the governor straight up, “Listen, honey, you need to do something to help us.” Father Young believes that night opened the governor’s mind. In the clip, he recalls starting many of the state’s treatment centers back in 1959.

From the Memoir

Every morning, Father Young watched roughly fifty men and women go before the judge on the same charge, public intoxication. When he asked local health officials for help, he says, the usual answer was that these were “bums, vagrants and persons who did not try to help themselves.” He didn’t buy it.

“I saw it differently. I saw people with no control over a mood-changing substance, and in the sixties that substance was usually alcohol.”

From Chapter 17, “240.40 — Don’t Incarcerate, Rehabilitate,” in his memoir Fifty Years Young.

The same chapter explains why the words mattered. The public called the fight decriminalization. Father Young had a different name for it: “I preferred to call it destigmatization.” In those days, he writes, going to an AA meeting meant risking being called a jailbird. Women were so afraid of being labeled criminals that they drank in secret, with no aftercare and no support. Calling it an illness gave people a diagnosis they could accept, and it opened the door to dignified care.

Then came the letter. Governor Rockefeller gave him written authority to go to the state mental health campuses and tell their directors to prepare addiction rehabilitation sites.

“It reminded me of being ‘a kid in a candy store’; with that letter in my pocket I felt like a ‘power broker,’ going from one campus to the next to set up centers of 45 to 60 beds each.”

From Chapter 9, “When Governor Rockefeller Asked About the ‘Harlem Drug,'” where he adds that most of those addiction treatment centers are still operating.

The payoff came in 1974. Governor Malcolm Wilson signed the bill decriminalizing public intoxication with no press and no fanfare, because so many groups had opposed it. That night Father Young celebrated with friends from the New York State Council on Alcoholism and the fellowship. As he writes in Chapter 17: “Now we could say it: treat, don’t incarcerate, the disease of addiction.”

Why It Matters Now

Here’s the legacy. Before anyone had the language for it, a priest in Albany looked at a courtroom full of people the system had written off and said: they’re sick, not criminal. Then he spent decades turning that belief into treatment centers, laws and a new way of seeing people. He writes that most counties now run alcohol and drug courts that send people to treatment instead of jail. “It took nearly sixty years,” he says, “but we got there.”

Now comes the movement. Every family that has watched someone they love get caught in addiction knows the old question still hangs around: is this person a criminal, or are they sick? Father Young answered it a lifetime ago. The work now is making sure the next generation doesn’t forget the answer, and doesn’t let the stigma creep back in.

Watch the full conversation with Father Peter G. Young on The Slingin Podcast at HoodzRadio.com, and follow Hoodz Radio so you don’t miss what’s next. His story gets the full treatment in 50 Years Young, our upcoming 10-part series, so keep an eye out.

Respect the Legacy. Amplify the Movement.