Last week, I traveled to Stanford Law School to speak about drug treatment courts, which are intended to divert drug offenders from prison to treatment.  I was part of a program entitled, “Drug Courts: Magic Bullets or Band-Aids?” 

My two co-panelists (Professor Eric Miller of St. Louis University and Attorney Theshia Naidoo of the Drug Policy Alliance) and I were all definitely more on the “band-aid” than “magic bullet” side of the question.  There is a great deal of variation among the nation’s roughly 2,000 existing drug courts, which makes generalizations difficult.  Moreover, only a few of the courts have been rigorously evaluated.  Still, many commentators (including me) have expressed concerns over the use of “shock incarceration” to punish relapse, high rates of “flunking out” of drug court (approaching or exceeding fifty percent in many programs), the tendency to punish drug court failures more harshly than they would have been punished had they been sentenced in a traditional criminal court, and the tendency to cherry-pick only the most promising (and hence least addicted) drug offenders for admission to drug court in order to keep failure rates as low as possible.  If the goal is to reduce the incarceration rate for nonviolent drug offenders — a very worth goal, in my estimation — then drug courts are apt to be little more than a marginal improvement over traditional case processing.

More information about the Stanford program is here.  (I understand that a podcast will be available at that link eventually.)  Many thanks to the Stanford Criminal Justice Center and the Stanford Law and Policy Review for cosponsoring this interesting discussion!