For about $30,000, we can incarcerate a drug offender. For about $5,000, we can rehabilitate a drug offender without putting him behind bars. Which option would you choose?

State legislators, who are struggling to balance the budget for what promises to be another trying fiscal year, are poised to make the wrong choice. By approving the 2011 state budget as presently proposed, lawmakers would eliminate the drug treatment/prison diversion programs created by the Drug Offender Reform Act in 2005.

What began as a three-year pilot program was awarded a $9 million budget and expanded statewide in fiscal 2009. But it landed on the budget chopping block for fiscal 2010 -- a victim of a poor performance audit and a state budget bind -- before receiving a last-minute, $3 million reprieve last year.

Advocates had hoped to double that paltry outlay this year, after seeing programs in four counties and the Uinta Basin eliminated. Instead, they're once again fighting to keep DORA alive, hoping to nurse it back to full health when the economy and state tax revenues recover.

Saving DORA represents an investment in cost-effective corrections, and an investment in humanity, that lawmakers can't afford to refuse. DORA empowers judges to steer qualifying nonviolent felony drug offenders into treatment programs, and away from prison. And the benefits, to taxpayers and to society as well as to drug offenders and their families, are many.

While being treated, program participants keep their jobs and continue paying taxes. Also, they retain custody of their children, keeping families intact and negating the need for state-subsidized care.

Participants are less likely to resume old habits -- only about 20 percent of DORA graduates return to drugs, compared to about 70 percent for non-program participants. That saves society even more money, and drug abusers' victims more grief, in the long haul. Plus, the program cuts incarceration costs and frees up prison beds, delaying costly prison construction projects

Sen. Chris Buttars, R-West Jordan, wants $2 million to salvage the remaining DORA programs. At this minimum funding level the 200 participants currently enrolled would continue to be served, but the door would be closed to future offenders.

Lawmakers should honor this reasonable request, drawing on the Rainy Day Fund if necessary. But why just sustain a program that pays such a good return in lives salvaged and dollars saved? Why not expand it? If lawmakers persist in this misguided attempt to save a little, society could lose a lot.