There 
are more than 2,140 drug courts in operation, with another 284 being planned or developed in the United States. The White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) discusses this in their website. Drug court diverts non-violent, substance abusing offenders from prison and jail into treatment. By increasing direct supervision of offenders, coordinating public resources, and expediting case processing, drug court can help break the cycle of criminal behavior, alcohol and drug use, and incarceration. A decade of research indicates that drug court reduces crime by lowering rearrest and conviction rates, improving substance abuse treatment outcomes, and reuniting families, and also produces measurable cost benefits. The attached PDF, entitled Defining Drug Courts: Key Components, outlines how drugs courts work. One of the ongoing dilemmas of drug courts is that most addicts are arrested for other crimes to get drugs and do not qualify for drug court. They consequently are not treated and usually re-offend. They don’t figure into the statistics of drug court success. This makes drug courts much less effective in reducing the much larger impact of drug related crime. Read a report by the Beckley Foundation that discusses why this is right here. Data base and links provided by Mary Slivinski.
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5 comments
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May 19, 2010 at 6:24 pm
Tom at Recovery Helpdesk
Where I live people who commit non-violent crimes to get money for drugs are eligible for drug court. This includes bad checks, shoplifting, burglaries etc. Not sure why other drug courts have different eligibility rules.
Tom
recoveryhelpdesk.com
junkjunk.ning.com
May 20, 2010 at 12:05 am
Bill
Tom – Hopefully more and more courts make the connection and tie in the drug court diversion with solid funded treatment.
October 2, 2012 at 8:40 pm
Barry Lessin
Bill– In a comprehensive review of research on drug court outcomes, the Drug Policy Alliance http://www.drugpolicy.org/drugcourts found that drug courts have disparate impacts on people of color, aren’t markedly better than probation, their emphasis on abstinence-only limits access to proven treatments, and don’t reduce incaceration. A fundamental problem is that in health-centered treatment outside criminal justice system, relapses are met with more intensive treatment; in drug court, relapse is met with punishment and removal from treatment.
Drug courts are at a least a step in the right direction, but they potentially harm many more people than they help. If you check out the link in the above paragraph you can access the full report on a pdf file.
October 2, 2012 at 9:04 pm
Bill Ford
That is a good point. I don’t see any appreciable improvements in the problem you point out either. I get to watch that system in action with my son right now. Learning a lot. I will check out the DPA link. How do we get to the point where we can design a better system?
October 3, 2012 at 7:50 pm
Barry Lessin
I’m trying to be patient by using the harm reduction principle of making small positive changes. Institutional/cultural change is obviously slow, and for people like your son caught in the system now, it doesnt feel very positive. The federal government is actually starting to mouth the word ‘decriminalization’ in it’s offical policy statements, so we’ll see.