Drug Court: An Effective Alternative to Incarceration

People in Dane County who commit drug-related crimes are less likely to commit new crimes if they complete drug treatment court (DTC) instead of going through traditional adjudication and incarceration.

Furthermore, drug court participants from specific populations—minorities, people with serious criminal histories, women, and people over age 35—also went longer before committing new crimes.

These results were according to a study led by Department of Family Medicine (DFM) Assistant Professor Randall Brown, MD, PhD, which was recently published online in the Journal of Offender Rehabilitation.

Rigorous Study Design

Using public data from the Wisconsin Circuit Court, Dr. Brown and his team identified 137 people who were charged with drug-related crimes from 2004 through 2006, and who had participated in the Dane County DTC.

Like other programs around the country, the Dane County DTC provides drug offenders with substance abuse treatment services in addition to judicial supervision.

Each person in the DTC group was matched with two people from the same database who had gone through traditional adjudication. Individuals were matched according to age, gender, ethnicity, criminal history, and severity of first drug-related offense.

According to Dr. Brown, the matched case-cohort design of this study provided much more robust information about DTC effectiveness than previously published studies.

“What you see most in the literature are program evaluations,” he explained, “which tend to be less rigorous in terms of the comparison groups and methods used for analyzing outcomes.”

Effective for Vulnerable and High-Risk Offenders

Dr. Brown and his team then analyzed the rates of recidivism—defined as a repeat offense resulting in conviction—between the two groups. They found that:

• DTC graduates were less likely to commit a new crime than the non-DTC graduates (30% vs. 46%).
• Mean jail time for a repeat offense, when committed, was significantly shorter in the DTC group than the non-DTC group (44 days vs. 126 days).
• Mean time to recidivism for DTC graduates was longer (614 days) than non-DTC graduates (463 days).

Specific populations—minorities, women, and people over age 35—also did particularly well after DTC. This is important because research is conflicted on whether DTC is effective for minority groups.

Part of that conflict is due to lack of data, Dr. Brown explains. “A lot of DTC studies focus on a population without controlling for factors specific to that population, such as employment status, educational attainment, or drug of choice.”

Study results also showed that DTC was effective for people who had prior felony convictions. In most jurisdictions, DTCs exclude people with serious criminal histories. But these results may help spur investigations into expanding DTC programs to include high-risk offenders.

“Drug courts everywhere are trying to fine tune their target population and define appropriate services for that population,” Dr. Brown said. “Of course, we have to walk a line between serving the offender and promoting long-term public safety, versus determining that some individuals are acutely dangerous and need to be kept from society.”

Related Work: Impact of Jail Sanctions and an OWI Court Proposal

In another recent study—also using data from the Dane County DTC—Dr. Brown analyzed how short-term jail sanctions impact drug court completion.

He found that people who are not acclimated to incarceration (i.e., those without an extensive criminal history) may be more likely to respond to an initial jail sanction for DTC noncompliance, and ultimately, complete treatment. Offenders who are more acclimated to incarceration, however, may require a DTC program that has more stringent supervision and individualized services.

Dr. Brown is also partnering with the Dane County DTC to advance an Operating While Intoxicated (OWI) treatment court, currently in its pilot stages. In a grant proposal submitted to the Wisconsin Partnership Program, the team has requested support to expand services to more OWI offenders, and to evaluate the specific factors that predict program completion and effectiveness.