Drug Courts and its Benefits

Drug Courts and its Benefits

Introduction

Vancouver is one of several Canadian cities in the midst of responding to a host of serious health and social problems associated with injection drug use including: substance misuse, infectious disease epidemics, high rates of drug overdose deaths, mental illness, crime, poverty, and homelessness. Along with expansion of proven effective interventions aimed at reducing the negative impacts of these health and social problems (Office; Gossop and Hubbard). Canadian drug policymakers have also recently felt pressure to consider a criminal justice focused treatment alternative for drug offenders. Drug courts are now being hailed by some as a necessary adjunct to the expanding system of treatment and care. Support for implementation of drug courts in Canada appears to be buoyed by a rapid expansion of and an accompanying rampant enthusiasm for drug court programs south of the border in the U.S. The purpose of this paper is to examine the evidence behind the notion that drug courts might be an effective treatment intervention for substance misusing drug offenders.

Background

A drug court is a mandated judicial supervision and addiction treatment alternative to incarceration that has flourished in the USA over the past decade. Most drug courts offer an intensely supervised addiction treatment program as an alternative to standard judicial sentencing. Offenders who successfully complete the program may have charges dropped or sentences revoked, while unsuccessful participants, including dropouts, are returned to the regular court system and face possible imprisonment. One researcher has described the drug court model as a mechanism within which 'the various components of the criminal justice and substance abuse treatment systems work together to try and use the coercive power of the court to promote abstinence and prosocial behavior' (Belenko, 1998a). The working assumption is that the combination of close, frequent judicial supervision and intensive addiction treatment result in high program retention and compliance rates along with reduced illicit drug use and reduced recidivism.

The enthusiasm behind the development of a mandated treatment alternative to incarceration stems from pragmatic as well as altruistic roots. In the USA, the prison population has expanded dramatically. This has generated enormous costs to the correctional system and has also increased the risk of transmission of infectious disease among inmates. Between 1980 and 1996, the U.S. prison population grew from 307 to 868 inmates per 100,000 adult population, an increase of 180% (Belenko, 1998b). In 1996, the U.S. incarceration rate was second only to the Russian Federation and ahead of countries such as China and South Africa. More importantly, on a per capita basis, the U.S. rate is almost six times the Canadian incarceration rate. Most of the rate increase in the U.S. can be accounted for by increased incarceration rates for drug law violators in response to rigid enforcement of drug laws that compel judges to impose harsh mandatory sentences. The proportion of U.S. federal inmates incarcerated for drug law violations increased from 25 to 60% from 1980 to 1995. The proportion for state and local jails increased from ...