Explore the vast range of titles available.

Juvenile drug courts are on the rise in the United States, as a result of a favorable political climate and justice officials' endorsement of the therapeutic jurisprudence movement--the concept of combining therapeutic care with correctional discipline. The goal is to divert nonviolent youth drug offenders into addiction treatment instead of long-term incarceration. Discretionary Justice overviews the system, taking readers behind the scenes of the juvenile drug court. Based on fifteen months of ethnographic fieldwork and interviews at a California court, Leslie Paik explores the staff's decision-making practices in assessing the youths' cases, concentrating on the way accountability and noncompliance are assessed. Using the concept of \"workability,\" Paik demonstrates how compliance, and what is seen by staff as \"noncompliance,\" are the constructed results of staff decisions, fluctuating budgets, and sometimes questionable drug test results. While these courts largely focus on holding youths responsible for their actions, this book underscores the social factors that shape how staff members view progress in the court. Paik also emphasizes the perspectives of children and parents. Given the growing emphasis on individual responsibility in other settings, such as schools and public welfare agencies, Paik's findings are relevant outside the juvenile justice system.

BackgroundTo promote parent-child reunification, family dependency drug courts (FDDCs) facilitate substance use disorder treatment for people whose children have been removed due to parental substance use. The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted FDDC operations, forcing FDDCs to quickly adapt to new circumstances. Although existing research has examined COVID-19 impacts on adult drug courts and civil dependency courts, studies have yet to examine the impact of COVID-19 on FDDCs specifically.MethodsTo explore the impact of COVID-19 on FDDCs, we conducted 20 focus groups and 5 individual interviews with court team members from five Florida FDDCs between 2020 and 2022. Data were analyzed using iterative categorization.ResultsFive overarching themes emerged. First, FDDCs adopted virtual technology during the pandemic and more flexible drug screening policies. Second, virtual technology was perceived as improving hearing attendance but decreasing client engagement. FDDC team members discussed a potential hybrid in-person/virtual hearing model after the pandemic. Third, COVID-19 negatively impacted parent-child visitation opportunities, limiting development of bonds between parents and children, and parent-child bonding is a key consideration during judicial reunification decisions. Fourth, COVID-19 negatively impacted the mental health of court team members and clients. Court team members adopted new informal roles, such as providing technical support and emotional counseling to clients, in addition to regular responsibilities, resulting in feeling overwhelmed and overworked. Court team members described clients as feeling more depressed and anxious, in part due to limited visitation opportunities with children, which decreased clients’ motivation for substance use recovery. Fifth, COVID-19 decreased recruitment of potential clients into FDDCs.ConclusionsIf FDDCs continue to rely on virtual hearings beyond the pandemic, they must develop practices for improving client engagement during virtual hearings. FDDCs should preemptively develop procedures for improving parent-child visitation during future public health crises, because limited visitation opportunities could weaken parent-child bonding and, ultimately, the likelihood of reunification.

Objectives Problem-solving courts are traditionally voluntary in nature to promote procedural justice and to advance therapeutic jurisprudence. The Family Treatment Drug Court (FTDC) in Lancaster County, Nebraska is a mandatory dependency court for families with allegations of child abuse or neglect related to substance use. We conducted a program evaluation examining parents’ case outcomes and perceptions of procedural justice to examine whether a mandatory problem-solving court could replicate the positive outcomes of problem-solving courts. Methods We employed a quasi-experimental design that compared FTDC parents to traditional dependency court parents (control parents). We examined court records to gather court orders, compliance with court orders, case outcomes, and important case dates. We also conducted 263 surveys (FTDC = 232; control = 31) to understand parents’ perceptions of procedural justice in the court process. Results Overall, FTDC parents were more compliant with some court orders than control parents. Although FTDC and control parents did not have significantly different case outcomes, FTDC parents’ cases closed significantly faster than control parents’ cases. FTDC parents also had higher perceptions of procedural justice than control parents. Mediation analyses indicated that FTDC parents believed the court process was more fair and therefore participated more consistently in court-ordered services and therefore reunified more often than control parents. Conclusions Mandatory problem-solving courts can serve parents through the same mechanisms as voluntary problem-solving courts. More research is necessary to examine which specific elements of problem-solving courts, aside from the voluntary nature, are essential to maintain their effectiveness.

Introduction Drug courts are criminal justice programs to divert people with substance use disorders from incarceration into treatment. Drug courts have become increasingly popular in the US and other countries. However, their effectiveness in reducing important public health outcomes such as recidivism and substance-related health harms remains ambiguous and contested. We used nationwide register data from Sweden to evaluate the effectiveness of contract treatment sanction, the Swedish version of drug court, in reducing substance misuse, adverse somatic and mental health outcomes, and recidivism. Methods In this prospective cohort study, two quasi-experimental designs were used: difference-in-differences and the within-individual design. In the latter, we compared the risk of outcomes during time on contract treatment to, 1) parole after imprisonment and, 2) probation. Results The cohort included 11,893 individuals (13% women) who underwent contract treatment. Contract treatment was associated with a reduction of 7 percentage points (95% CI: -.088, -.055) in substance misuse, 5 percentage points (-.064, -.034) in adverse mental health events, 9 percentage points (-.113, -.076) in adverse somatic health events, and 3 fewer charges (-3.16, -2.85) for crime in difference-in-differences analyses. Within-individual associations suggested that the same individual had longer times-to-event for all outcomes during contract treatment than on parole or on probation. Conclusions Contract treatment is an effective intervention from both public health and criminal justice perspective. Our findings suggest that it is a superior alternative to incarceration in its target group. Further, we find that an implementation approach that is less punitive and more inclusive than what is typical in the US can be successful.

We sought to understand the individual level predictors of intermediate outcomes in a diversion drug court. Outcomes included acceptance to drug court, sanction(s), incentives(s), drug test results, and graduation. Because much of the prior literature on individual level predictors of these outcomes is mixed, drug courts can benefit from analysis of their own data to understand what factors are important, or not, for their population. We analyzed administrative data and found significant predictors varied by outcome. Results showed that the court adhered to best practices (Florida Adult Drug Court Best Practice Standards, 2017), because there were no race or sex differences between those accepted to drug court or not, those sanctioned when in drug court, and those graduated successfully versus unsuccessfully discharged. The court team can use these findings to better understand their population, their program, and ensure compliance with best practices. Results also contribute to the broader drug court literature.

Drug court programs are informed by the disease concept of addiction, but those who suffer from substance use disorders remain guilty of their charges. To avoid further punishment, they must agree to treatment and also become subject to all the mandates of the court, including issues regarding housing, childcare, education, and employment. Thus, rather than changing the War on Drugs, the drug court movement has effectively preserved the criminalization of substance use while extending the carceral state. Through a reflection on Augustine’s concept of order in the Christian faith, this article explores the logics behind our assumption that punishment has a healing or ordering effect on appetitive desire. I suggest that multiple concept pairs related to order and disorder make it “feel right” or commonsensical to subject disposable populations—the poor, BIPOC individuals, and the mentally ill—to punishment as a kind of reform within which the individual order and the social order combine. The three strands of appetitive vice, race, and poverty wind together throughout the history of reform, and medical knowledge has often aided rather than corrected this process. I conclude by considering how these strands help us move toward a liberative understanding of addiction as a symptom of social pathology.

Objectives We report the results of a multilevel structural equation model of the Multisite Adult Drug Court Evaluation that empirically tests theoretical pathways to desistance from drug use and criminal behavior. Methods First, we consider how to operationalize the theoretical mechanisms through which drug court practices are meant to impact outcomes. A path model is proposed that delineates how drug-court practices change perceptions and attitudes, and how these changes subsequently affect drug use and crime. Proposed mediators include changes in court practices (e.g., court appearances, drug testing, and treatment) and psychological mediators, including perceived risk and reward (deterrence), perceived legitimacy (procedural justice), and motivation to change one’s behavior through substance abuse treatment. Results Results suggest that one element of procedural justice, the clients’ attitude toward the judge, is the most crucial theoretical mediator on the pathway to desistance from drug use and crime. Conclusions Study limitations and directions for future research are discussed.

This study employs predictive analytics to develop a decision support system for the prediction of recidivism in drug courts. Based on the input from subject matter experts, recidivism is defined as the violation of the treatment program requirements within three years after admission. We use two data processing methods to improve the accuracy of predictions: synthetic minority oversampling and survival data mining. The former creates a balanced data set and the latter boosts the model’s performance by adding several new, informative variables to the data set. After running several tree-based machine learning algorithms on the input data, random forest achieved the best performance (AUROC = 0.884, accuracy = 80.76%). Compared with the original data, oversampling and survival data mining increased AUROC by 0.068 and 0.018, respectively. Their combined contribution to AUROC was 0.088. We present a simplified version of decision rules and explain how the decision support system can be deployed. Therefore, this paper contributes to the analytics literature by illustrating how date/time variables - in applications where the response variable is defined as the occurrence of some event within a certain period - can be used in data management to improve the performance of predictive models and the resulting decision support systems.

Objectives This study compares 15-year recidivism and incarceration outcomes for individuals randomly assigned to Baltimore City’s Drug Treatment Court (BCDTC) or traditional adjudication. Additionally, the study examines the moderating effect of court of assignment. Methods This study is based on a randomized controlled trial. Participants include 235 drug-involved offenders with substantial criminal and substance use disorder histories who were adjudicated within Baltimore City’s District and Circuit Courts. Key measures include number of arrests; convictions; person, property, drug, and violation of probation (VOP) charges; and days of incarceration. A measure of exposure time is included to account for time spent free in the community. Negative binomial regression and growth curve models test for group differences on each dependent variable over the 15-year follow-up. Additional models assess whether or not originating court moderates the treatment effect. Results Participation in BCDTC resulted in significantly fewer arrests, charges, and convictions across the 15-year follow-up period, including several crime-specific differences. Originating court moderated the effect of participation for convictions, such that treatment participants in the Circuit drug court had significantly better outcomes than those in the District drug court relative to their controls. Participation in BCDTC did not have a significant effect on total days of sentenced incarceration. Conclusions Results suggest that drug courts have the potential to lead to sustained, long term effects on criminal offending for individuals with significant criminal history records and chronic substance use histories.

The aim of this study was to report the evaluation of the pilot study of drug court, as the main approach to the Comprehensive, Systematic, and Integrated ( CSI) model for organizing and managing homeless addicts in Iran. Drug court was established in six provinces of Iran, in mid-2018. Drug court establishment protocols and guidelines were developed by an extensive review of the national and international evidences and in-depth interviews and focus group discussions by a large number of experts in different related majors. Evaluation of the pilot of drug court was done by a mixed method of a quantitative and qualitative study (interview and field visit). Four stages were considered for the establishment of the drug courts. Totally, 756 cases were admitted to the drug courts for 6 months. The pilot study of drug courts in Iran showed that it could have promising results in the establishment of the CSI model for organizing and managing homeless addicts. However, there are some challenges that need to be addressed, like poor inter-sectoral and intra-sectoral collaboration and rapid changes in the management of the involved organizations.