Seán Foy, Director of Addiction and Counselling Studies at The Learning Curve Institute, blogs on the use of the Drugs Treatment Court Programme in Ireland.

The Drug Treatment Court Programme is a system that enables drug addicts who have been convicted of non-violent crimes to have a “chance to escape the cycle of drugs, crime and prison”. It makes sense to me; I mean if someone is addicted to a substance and they need to resort to crime in order to feed their habit, then just giving that person a jail term when they are caught may not actually work or be the best way to help the person. We need to offer much more than this to people who find themselves in this situation and the Drug Courts are an essential part of this.

According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, evaluations have consistently shown that Drug Treatment Courts effectively reduce recidivism and underlying addiction problems of drug abusing offenders. They provide closer, more comprehensive supervision and more frequent drug testing and monitoring during the programme than other forms of community supervision. There is a lot of support among addiction workers for Drug Courts as they are a much more humane way to deal with people who have addiction issues and have then become involved in crime. The Drug Courts Treatment Programme is also an extremely cost effective system;

According to the United Nations

“It costs approximately $8,000 Canadian dollars per annum to provide substance abuse treatment to the Toronto Drug Treatment Court participant and $45,000 to incarcerate the same participant for one year…”

“Only 11.6% of those who complete the drug court programme run into trouble again with the law.” (Canada)

It is reasonable to assume that similar savings can be achieved in Ireland but it appears that the Irish Drug Court system may well come to an end as there have been “disappointing” results. For example between 2002 and 2008 only 22 offenders a year had been admitted to the scheme – a fifth of what had been expected and only 17% of them had completed the programme to the satisfaction of the court.

So why has this happened? It would appear that the idea of Drug Courts is an effective one, so why the “disappointing” results? Are we so different from other countries that Drug Courts will not work here?

An interesting study was conducted in Southern California and presented at the annual meeting of the American Society of Criminology, on the 11th of March 2009 which may help answer these questions.

The study evaluated the impact of “enhanced” drug court services in Southern California. These enhanced services, including specialty counselling groups, educational/employment resources and increased residential treatment beds, were designed to increase programme retention and successful completion (graduation) of the Drug Court programme. This study examined outcomes for 477 male and 273 female Drugs Court participants between January 2004 and March 2005 in Orange County, California. The results suggest several enhancements individually increase participation retention (as opposed to termination) in Drug Court; In particular education, employment, residential treatment, and two specialty counselling groups (Alcohol Recovery and Mask of Addiction).

The combination of residential treatment, specialty counselling groups and employment achievement vastly increased graduation for drug court participants. This research suggests further examination of these variables in alternate settings to determine the extent to which these strong but preliminary results can be generalized.

It may be a good idea for the Irish Judiciary system to look to California and the findings in this study to find a way of making our Drug Courts here work more efficiently here. It may well be the case that by changing some part of the treatment, for example by offering enhanced treatments, the Drug Courts system can be retained and as a result more people who are suffering with an addiction will be offered a more humane and cost effective alternative to jail. Surely this can only be a good thing.

Seán Foy will be delivering the FETAC Level 5 Courses in Community Addiction Studies and  Substance Use – Issues in Youthwork at The Learning Curve Institute in January 2010. Click Here for full details and booking information for both courses.