Drug Courts

Drug court programs began in the late 1980s in response to the nation's escalating problem of drug possession, use, sales, and drug-related criminal offenses. Traditional judicial efforts to stem the escalation of drug use included harsher legal penalties for drug use and drug-related crimes, court-mandated treatment for criminals upon release from incarceration, and increasingly severe court-ordered sanctions for relapse, recidivism, or failure to follow mandatory treatment. Unfortunately, these traditional efforts at reducing drug use and drug-related crimes proved to be ineffective.

Harsher penalties equated to increased levels of incarceration in jail and prison while awaiting trial and upon adjudication. In 1999, almost 33% of all offenders released from state prisons had drug use histories, and by 2004, 37% of defendants in criminal cases were adjudicated for drug-related offenses. The result was that the nation's jails and prisons quickly overflowed with criminals convicted of "minor," nonviolent crimes; 7.4% of all arrests in 1987 and 13.1% of all arrests in 2005 were attributed to drug-related crimes. State such as Texas and California were unable to safely house the massive numbers in custody and faced federal fines for overcrowding and the use of temporary housing options such as tents. The nation's courts also experienced severe backlogs, as crimes that previously received little or no sanctions now required court hearings and jury trials. This backlog threatened individual rights to a speedy trial, swamping city and county jails with offenders awaiting adjudication and threatening cities' and counties' ability to house those arrested for more violent offenses or career criminals.

These increasingly severe legal sanctions in America's "War on Drugs" also failed to reduce drug use in general. Court-ordered treatment stipulations often were ineffective because of delayed offender assessment and implementation of treatment, lack of available treatment resources, sanctions of insufficient length to address the chronic nature of substance dependence, and failure to address the drug abuse issue from a comprehensive standpoint (e.g., including issues such as co-occurring disorders, domestic violence, mental illness, physical illness, unemployment, and lack of education). From 1998 to 2005, the percentage of all persons over the age of 12 admitting to current use of illicit drugs rose from approximately 6% to just over 8% of the U.S. population, while the percentage of the U.S. population admitting to alcohol use remained just over 50%. Finally, a corollary to the failure in America's "War on Drugs," traditional judicial methods failed to reduce recidivism and stop the offenders' revolving door in and out of custody. Between 1990 and 2000, the rate of offender recidivism from state parole remained at approximately 59%, and the estimated numbers of arrests for drug abuse violations increased from 322,300 in 1970 to 1,654,600 in 2005.

In 1989, the Miami-Dade County's 11th judicial circuit, including Florida's State Attorney General Janet Reno, Public Defender Bennett Drummer, and Judges Gerald Wetherington and Kerbet Klein responded to the county's rising levels of cocaine-related arrests by designing and implementing the first "Expedited Drug Case Management" system, now known as the "drug court" (http://www.nadcp.org/whatis). This program reflected a change in correctional philosophy from incapacitation, punishment, and deterrence toward rehabilitation and restoration. Additionally, the program followed the general move toward team-oriented and community-based programs promoted by custodial agencies such as the states' parole and probation departments, and other partnerships, including TASC (Treatment Alternative to Street Crime). The mission of this program was to provide drug treatment to nonviolent offenders, while reducing the influx of these types of criminals into jail and prison beds, and to provide for a reduction in time from arrest to conviction for nonviolent offenders.

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