Specialty Court Recidivism

Beginning research looked at how many times an individual was arrested after completing the program, how much time passed before being arrested, and how much jail time an individual previously had as indicators of reoffending (Burns et al., 2013). Belenko (2001) is often credited as the pioneer for critically analyzing drug courts’ efficacy in which the author found that drug courts reduce recidivism and save money. However, DeMatteo et al. (2013) claims that because there are so many variations between specialty courts, obtaining accurate data is difficult.

Inaccurate measures led Palermo (2010) to research how the amount of arrests prior to entering the specialty court program and the number of arrests after exiting program determined the

Those who graduated are then often compared to those clients who were terminated from the program. In addition, research as not examined if a client’s length in time in program affects that client even if he or she is unsuccessful in the program. In other words, there is not enough data to indicate the extent of specialty court’s impact on unsuccessful clients. In the medical profession, researchers need to track all patients who use a particular medicine even if the medicine did not work. This is necessary to identify the long-term lasting effects of medicine. Similarly, specialty court recidivism research needs to do the same. This prompted the authors to measure specialty court’s influence on clients who did not complete the program. This data is and should be required to determine specialty court’s efficacy. This approach to measure unsuccessful clients is essential and should not be discarded. The authors measured other factors besides recidivism, time to recidivism, and drug use. The authors also looked at unsuccessful clients’ abstinence from drugs, quality of life factors, employment, education, interpersonal relationships, and babies born drug free.

Then researchers wanted to determine mental health court and DUI court’s efficacy. Researchers saw that mental health court had similar results as drug court. Most DUI court research was based on unpublished articles, which did

Fielding et al. (2002) reported that the higher the client’s risk level (based on previous crimes), the more likely that he or she would recidivate, time to new arrest was shorter, and time to new drug arrest was shorter. Again, this study is limited in size and generalizability. Just as important, the authors found that it was cheaper for a client to go through the program than be incarcerated in prison or placed in residential treatment. This analysis is only valid when comparing the cost of incarcerating a client in prison and the costs for a client to participate in the program. This study does not look at the ancillary costs like the payroll for specialty court team members nor does it compare the costs to the correctional officer team