The first drug court was launched in Dade County, Florida, in 1989, and there are now close to 2,500 such courts across the United States (Huddleston & Marlowe, 2011). A drug court is a specific co...

Drug Courts: An Interview With Dr. Michael Fendrich

https://www.courtinnovation.org/sites/default/files/documents/Assessing_Efectiveness.pdf

Assessing the effectiveness of drug courts on recidivism: A meta-analytic review of traditional and non-traditional drug courts

The principal purpose of ONDCP is to establish policies, priorities, and objectives for the Nation' s drug control program. The goals of the program are to reduce illicit drug use, manufacturing, and trafficking, drug-related crime and violence, and drug related health consequences. To achieve these goals, the Director of ONDCP is charged with producing the National Drug Control Strategy. The Strategy directs the Nation' s anti-drug efforts and establishes a program, a budget, and guidelines for cooperation among Federal, State, and local entities. By law, the Director of ONDCP also evaluates, coordinates, and oversees both the international and domestic anti-drug efforts of executive branch agencies and ensures that such efforts sustain and complement State and local anti-drug activities. The Director advises the President regarding changes in the organization, management, budgeting, and personnel of Federal Agencies that could affect the Nation' s anti-drug efforts and regarding Federal agency compliance with their obligations under the Strategy. prevention initiatives that strengthen the nation's criminal justice system. BJA provides leadership, services, and funding to America's communities by emphasizing local control; building relationships in the field; developing collaborations and partnerships; promoting capacity building through planning; streamlining the administration of grants; increasing training and technical assistance; creating accountability of projects; encouraging innovation; and ultimately communicating the value of justice efforts to decisionmakers at every level. The National Association of Drug Court Professionals (NADCP) was established in 1994 as the premier national membership and advocacy organization for drug courts. Representing over 16,000 drug court professionals and community leaders, NADCP provides a strong and unified voice to our nation' s leadership. By impacting policy and legislation, NADCP creates a vision of a reformed criminal justice system. NADCP' s mission is to reduce substance abuse, crime, and recidivism by promoting and advocating for the establishment and funding of drug courts and providing for the collection and dissemination of information, technical assistance, and mutual support to association members. In addition to staging over 130 state of the art training events each year, NDCI provides on-site technical assistance and relevant research and scholastic information to drug courts throughout the nation. Drug courts perform their duties without manifestation, by word or conduct, of bias or prejudice, including, but not limited to, bias or prejudice based upon race, gender, national origin, disability, age, sexual orientation, language or socioeconomic status. The National Drug Court Institute (NDCI) wishes to acknowledge all of those who have …

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Painting the current picture: a national report on drug courts and other problem-solving court programs in the united states

In recent years communities across the United States have instituted specialized criminal courts for defendants with substance abuse disorders and mental illness. These specialized courts seek to prevent incarceration and facilitate community-based treatment for offenders, while at the same time protecting public safety. The authors describe two types of specialized courts: drug courts and mental health courts. They critically examine the strengths and weaknesses of these courts and conclude with implications for social work education, practice, research, and advocacy.

Drug Courts and Mental Health Courts: Implications for Social Work

This article analyzes two of the central claims made on behalf of drug courts: that they divert offenders from incapacitatory prison regimes and that they treat drug addicts. Taken together, these claims form the central justification of the drug court's existence and the basis of the court's unusual style of procedure. The court often resembles something between a revivalist meeting and an Alcoholics Anonymous session. The judge has tremendous discretion over the manner in which rewards and sanctions are meted out. Sanctions can involve repeating parts of the program, referral to a variety of progressively more residential treatment programs, or short terms of imprisonment. Liberal critics tolerate these sanctions and the courtroom theater more generally as part of their rejection of imprisonment as a solution to the severity revolution in penal policy. Yet the effect of formalizing the diversion process has led, not to increasing the numbers of drug addicts escaping the reach of the criminal justice system, but rather in bringing more low-level offenders into the system. Thanks to a policing based on risk management, law enforcement agents are pressured to divert offenders up into the system, rather than out of the system. This net widening effect resulting in increased numbers of offenders in drug court, many of whom have no criminal record and no record of addiction. Despite the increased numbers of citizens caught under the drug court net, liberal critics embrace the drug court's practice of invasive behavior modification as a therapeutic alternative to incarceration. The drug court, however, often functions more as a form of coercive drug monitoring than a drug treatment regime. These courts' express goal may be understood as an attempt to change the addicts social norms by isolating the offender from malign social influences and substitute the judge as the sole authoritative arbiter of appropriate behavior. Yet many of these clients may not be addicted to drugs, and so any treatment is better understood as a form of incapacitation in which the length of the treatment is often much longer than the alternative prison sentence. I suggest that the emphasis on therapy is blinding liberal critics to the highly incapacitative effects of the drug court. If they are to embrace the drug court, legal liberals need to reformulate a theory of punishment that is able to endorse the prison as an alternative to drug court. Of the available theories, some form of retributivism would appear to provide the most likely candidate. Such a theory would permit us to balance, on a court-by-court basis, the social harm of drug crime, the punishment imposed by a particular jurisdiction for such crime, and the alternative drug court sanction, so as to endorse or reject the drug court in terms of its treatment program and incapacitatory effect.

/pdf/embracing-addiction-drug-courts-and-the-false-promise-of-2xrjkndbur.pdf

Drug Courts: An Interview With Dr. Michael Fendrich

References

Assessing the effectiveness of drug courts on recidivism: A meta-analytic review of traditional and non-traditional drug courts

Painting the current picture: a national report on drug courts and other problem-solving court programs in the united states

Drug Courts and Mental Health Courts: Implications for Social Work

Embracing Addiction: Drug Courts and the False Promise of Judicial Interventionism

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