There's a lesson here ... ~ I'm very glad Barry Hazle fought for his rights and won BIG! ~ ~ there are "live links" to more/corroborating information in the original ~ Sooz

How A California Man Was Forced To Spend 100 Days In Prison For Being An Atheist
by Ian Millhiser Posted on October 15, 2014 at 4:00 pm

Barry Hazle is an atheist who was incarcerated for a year due to a drug charge before he was released on parole. As a condition of his parole, however, Hazle was required to attend a 90-day residential drug treatment program. Although Hazle did not object to attending such a program, he did object to the fact that he was assigned to a 12-step program with explicitly religious content referring to “God” and a “higher power.” As Hazle wrote in an official challenge to this placement, “I have committed myself to a full and lasting secular recovery and complete abstinence from illegal drugs,” but he objects to “forced participation in any spiritual/religious activities.”

Despite his objections, Hazle remained in the religious 12-step program, all while unsuccessfully trying to get transferred to a secular program. A little over a month after he entered the program, however, the program complained that Hazle was “sort of passive aggressive.” Hazle was charged with a parole violation, arrested, and incarcerated for another 100 days. Though the state later claimed that he was removed from the 12-step program due to his own behavior, a federal judge rejected this claim, explaining that the state’s “argument rings hollow in light of the undisputed facts showing that Plaintiff was only ‘disruptive’ in the program ‘in a congenial way.’”

More importantly, the Constitution forbade the state of California from placing him in a religious program against his will in the first place. As the Supreme Court explained in the 1947 case Everson v. Board of Ed. of Ewing,


More recently, the federal appeals court which oversees California was even more direct. “For the government to coerce someone to participate in religious activities,” the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit explained in Inouye v. Kemna, “strikes at the core of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.” So Mr. Hazle could not be given a choice between participating in a religious program or being put back behind bars.

Hazle was paroled and later returned to prison in 2007. The final chapter in his encounter with the legal system was not written until Monday of this week — although it is a chapter that is likely to scare other states away from similar constitutional violations in the future. Under a settlement negotiated with the state and the contractor who ran the religious 12-step program, Hazle will receive nearly $2 million.

The state has also changed its policies to require parolees in Hazle’s position to “be referred to an alternative nonreligious program.”

(HT: Hemant Mehta)

http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2014/10/15/3580034/how-a-california-man-was-forced-to-spend-100-days-in-prison-for-being-an-atheist/

Hooray for him and kudos to the judge who saw through the state's claim!! Most people would have just sucked it up and completed the program quietly. It's time for the courts/states/US government (and everything in between) to separate themselves and their decisions from religion. In any shape, form or fashion. They can believe what they want, but they cannot impose that on any other citizen for any purpose.

Of course the religious right will see this as yet another attack on Christianity and claim persecution. lol

I think a concentrated course on Constitutional law should be mandated for every law maker in the country. They obviously didn't learn it in law school.....or they are willfully ignoring it to suit their own ends.

Seriously, part of the reason, I think, that they ordered AA is that it's free. I don't know of any non-religious programs that are free and that would mean the state would have to pay for it (aka, a real treatment program)

Unfortunately, there is a serious shortage of non religious drug treatment available. Almost all treatment programs use the twelve step model, which requires belief in and surrender to a higher power. Many of them don't think it's a problem as long as they don't make you say god but spirituality is a main component of their program. Even the big ones, Hazelden and Betty Ford use the model.

There is case that we are all taught about which establishes that practitioners can be held personally liable for not providing secular alternatives that, interestingly, was brought by a Catholic man. He was required as a term of his probation to attend AA. Devout Catholics believe it is a sin to attend any church other than the Catholic Church and the AA meetings were in the basement of another church. He sued everyone for wrongful imprisonment and won.

The few programs that are not spiritually based, Rational Recovery, Smart Recovery usually do not meet the requirements set forth in court for the number of sessions per week or documented attendance.

He wasn't going to make it anyway. It's clear from the fact that he believes 12-step programs are religious programs that he wasn't paying attention. There's lots of room in them for the whole gamut from atheists, agnostics, wiccans and pastafarians to worshippers of the Dolly Parton Holy Pair.

The following are the original twelve steps as published by Alcoholics Anonymous:[10]
1.We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.
2.Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3.Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
4.Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5.Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6.Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7.Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
8.Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
9.Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10.Continued to take personal inventory, and when we were wrong, promptly admitted it.
11.Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
12.Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelve-step_program

That looks pretty religious to me, and the alternative wordings don't improve it (see - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelve-step_program)

There are other ways to beat it.

Of course the religious right will see this as yet another attack on Christianity and claim persecution.

It is an attack on "Christianity" but hardly persecution. The attack is to stop their illegal activities and is perfectly legitimate.

I'm not thrilled. This guy (whose arrest in 2007 was for meth) is getting $2M because the state didn't have enough secular treatment facilities. I would like to think this $2M would go back to help addicts, but somehow I doubt it.

Admittedly I see more failures than successes at the hospital. Two weekends ago I saw two very sad cases. One was a 44 year old mother who had chronic pain issues who took suboxene from an unnamed someone. She was up on the floor and out of ICU when I left. Told Dr. G that it wasn't an intentional overdose, she just wanted the pain to go away. Her obituary was in the paper midweek.

The 20 year old male seemed actually more hopeless to me. He got beat up by gang members before he was brought in. He told me in May it was hopeless. He never saw one glimmer of hope for his future. He went for inpatient treatment for about the third time then. We'll see.

Now read the Book that came from.....especially the Chapter to the Atheist. You know, the guy did have a choice. He accepted going to the program in order to get out of jail. He could have just stayed in jail if treatment was so obnoxious to him.

Why would I want to read the book? I managed well enough without it, or any "12 point program" for that matter.
But checking on it there doesn't appear to be a chapter to the atheist anyway. (Agnostics are a different group altogether).

I don't have a lot of sympathy for the guy either. But if his "disruption" was due to not going along with the religious bit then .....

The state broke the law.

Sorry, I should have said "Agnostics" but it doesn't matter, it covers all of them. Like I said, the guy had no intention of cleaning-up in any event. Maybe after a few more stints in prison he'll get the idea and start paying attention to the people who are trying to help him....or maybe he'll continue to live in denial and righteous indignation and be dead.

If it involves anything to do with "higher powers" or "spirituality" it doesn't cover me Jim.

What carrot?

This case was decided by a jury in 2008 and they said his rights were violated and awarded him nothing. I actually liked that solution. Win, win. The state changed their policies so people aren't mandated to AA-type programs by their parole officers, and this guy (and his lawyers) wasn't rewarded $2M for being an atheist addict. In-patient rehab is expensive, btw. They didn't chose this program because it's cheap.

Despite the way program is laid-out AA has nothing to do with either religion or spirituality. Spend a little time learning about it and you will find that the whole thrust of the program is to teach the alcoholic that he is not the centre of the universe, that other people do things for reasons other than to screw the alcoholic-up and that he cannot compel the world to dance to his tune. The references to a higher power are simply to remind him that he is not in control of the universe.

There are other programs out there that claim to have some success rate in helping people with addiction issues but none have had the kind of success that AA and it's derivatives have.

I can only speak for the Chicago area, but I'm thinking whether or not AA focuses on "a higher power" depends on the chapter ~ I have a very close friend who has been in AA for approaching 20 years ~ it took him attending meetings at 5 different local AA chapters before he found one that was less [not "free from", but less] God-centric ~

Sooz

Five will get you ten he will now attend any meeting.

Which "he", jim? ~ if you're referring to my friend, you'd be 100% wrong ~

Sooz

The meetings have different cultures. People often attend many different meetings but choose one to be their home group where they feel most connected. Sure, there are many people, who if they suck it up, they might be helped by AA/NA.
But there are also people who really can't conceive of a higher power or spiritual assistance and they just aren't going to get it that way.
And sure, lots of people are just atheist for the moment, because they don't want to go to meetings.But it's not for the government to decide. And that has been held up as law all the way to the Supreme Court.

Which "he", jim? ~ if you're referring to my friend, you'd be 100% wrong ~

It just seems to me that if the guy has been in AA for 20 years and AA requires some kind of belief in a higher power, he's accepted that there are forces greater than he is.

I did spend a "little time" researching it Jim. Maybe if I spent a lot of time I might find another account of the "spirituality" component that matches yours, but I don't see any real point in doing that. The more I read about the AA program the less I like it. And a part of the reason I dislike it is that it mirrors religious conceptions of the personal and moral universe, whether or not its overtly religious. The centre of the "universe" stuff is just an example of the "bleeding obvious" in my book.

In this particular case the real question is whether or not the program this guy was put into was religious based or not.

he's accepted that there are forces greater than he is.

Anyone who hasn't accepted that is a raving lunatic.

(a D3 Dozer springs to mind).

ie: an alcoholic.

And that's all the higher power/God/Force/Society whatever you want to call it of AA is - a force greater than you. You can dislike it all you want Cattleman but millions of alcoholics have recovered using AA as compared to a handful using other programs.

And some of us have recovered without any of the BS Jim.

I know a few "alcoholics" who aren't anything like "raving lunatics" Jim. I'm one of them.

Then you're among the few.