Drug courts: effectiveness and implementation in criminal justice

Drug Courts

One of the increasing trends in the justice system on a state by state basis has been the establishment of drug courts. The impetus behind the creation of the drug court is twofold: children and mothers. The creation of the drug courts is a response to the needs of women and children, most of who fall into statistical categories related to single parent families, poverty, and abuse. Drug courts are an effort on the part of the justice system to deal with women and children who come before the court as criminals, and who are faced with potential incarceration, in different and innovative ways. The goal is not to separate mothers from their children who could become wards of the state. As wards of the state, the children become part of a system that could keep mothers and their children separated for years, even life. For children, the drug courts represent the effort to keep these children out of the prison system, and to give them and their families an opportunity to redirect their lives away from drugs and the penal system (Schwebel, R., 2002, p. 176).

This essay is a brief examination of the drug courts, especially the extent to which they have been successful. How are the courts making this new approach to women and children work? This question will be the focus of this essay, and the answer will be culled from existing journal studies and books on drug courts.

The Drug Courts

The drug courts bean initially as an experiment. The idea was make separate those cases that upon pretrial review were determined to be salvageable. By that, it is meant that the people who were to appear before the court, looked like first-time offenders, mentally ill clients, or women. Often times these people were experiencing difficult times, and the reversal of their fortunes might begin with the opportunity to receive counseling, and they could turn their lives around.

Drug courts first made their appearance in the late 1980s, against the backdrop of the "extreme pressures placed on both the judicial process and local correctional populations" by the increasingly punitive drug policies of the 1980s. (35) as has been often noted, the United States declared a "war on drugs" in the 1980s, driven at least in part by broad public fears of a perceived crack cocaine epidemic. (36) Throughout the decade, the federal government and many states "increased public spending on antidrug law enforcement and dramatically augmented criminal penalties for the sale and possession of illegal drugs," (37) with the federal government instituting mandatory minimum sentences for some drug crimes. (38) Between 1980 and 1993, American prison and jail populations tripled, much of the increase due to increased number of drug convictions and longer sentences for drug offenses. (39) by 1994, "drug traffickers (19%) and drug possessors (12.5%) together made up 31.4% of felons convicted in [s]tate courts," (40) and over half of all federal prisoners were drug offenders. (41) Even as law enforcement efforts intensified and sanctions for drug offenders were made more severe, publicly funded treatment became a lower priority (Armstrong, Andrew, 2003, 133)."

Very quickly law makers and legal representatives realized that the early drug courts worked. The courts removed the participants from the criminal system, although there was always that the caveat that failure could be mean returning to that system (133). The court actually became a partner in the pursuit of the client's sobriety and treatment (133). The court would regularly review the cases adherence to the sobriety protocols of the program (133). This legal supervision actually served as an incentive for the participants to become sober, and to remain that way.

Speaking at a New York State meeting on drug courts, social worker, Nahama Broner, from the New York University School of Social Work, commented that the drug courts were making a positive difference in the lives of families in New York State (Conference, 2002, 1858). Broner encouraged the many lawmakers and judicial system participants in the meeting to work to expand the drug courts, which recognized the treatable condition as a social one, not a criminal one (1858).

Adolescents and Children

The drug courts have become part of the solution, not the problem in the lives of thousands of children and adolescents across the country (Schwebel, 176).

Juvenile drug courts are increasing in the United States, as a result of increasing availability of external funding, raising the question of what constitutes a "serious" juvenile drug user. Nearly half of all adolescents in the United States will try some form of illegal drug before they reach 18 years of age. However, the majority of these drug users are able to control their behavior and go on to lead productive lives (Church II, Wesley, 2006, 89)."

The drug courts take the adolescents and children out of a system that could ostensibly lead to more serious crimes, and supervises their individual case loads and success. Social workers and therapists from the drug programs that work with the children make regular appearances before the court, updating the judges on the individual progress of the kids. It is difficult to predict the exact number of kids who have been turned away from a life of more serious crimes through their successful pre-incarceration therapy, but researchers cite as positive a reduction in the number of the children and adolescents involved in drug related crimes (Church II, 89).