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Drug Court Case Study

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• When developing drug court programs, drug courts should combine alcohol and other drug treatment services with the criminal justice system. The two complement each other and ensures success when participants are willing. • Drug courts should use a non-adversarial approach in that both prosecution and defense counsels work together to promote public safety and protect due process rights of the participants. • Drug courts should ensure all eligible participants are identified early and placed in the drug court program as soon as possible. • Drug courts should provide constant and consistent access to drug treatment and rehabilitation services. • Drug courts should have coordinated strategies that govern drug court responses to participant’s …show more content…

There’s a deferred prosecution program and a post-adjudication program. Deferred prosecution will reroute certain defendants to the drug court program before they plead to a charge. The post-adjudication program mandates that a defendant must first plead guilty to the charge before suggesting drug court as an option. The defendant’s sentence is then deferred or suspended until successful completion of the program. If successfully completed, the sentence will be waived or expunged, if not completed, the defendant (as mentioned above) is returned to the court for processing of the case under normal criminal court regulations (Burke, …show more content…

Whenever interventions are instituted, the success rate will never be 100 percent. As it pertains to drug courts, the success or lack of success could be due to a number of reasons. A few notable reasons are said to have to do with the way the program is set up, the wrong type of defendants selected, and even that the program is poorly administered. When measuring a drug court’s effectiveness, it’s imperative that all data related to the drug court and its defendants are carefully evaluated. It has been found that some evaluations performed on drug courts fail to produce positive results because they many do not completely fulfill all of the research on the courts and the participants. They fail to follow participants for an acceptable period of time after completing or were disqualified from the program, and comparisons are often biased. As one can see, there are many irregularities and weaknesses in many of the evaluations done on drug courts, leaving inconsistent and questionable findings on whether the program is successful or not (Burke, 2010). Just as there are supporters of drug courts who will attest to their success, there are an equal amount of critics who believe that drug courts are ineffective. One of the main factors that has been noted as the reason for the program’s lack of success is that since each state regulates its own program, it’s hard to effectively

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