John Collins - Rethinking Drug Courts: International Experiences of a US Policy Export

The International Drug Policy Unit (IDPU) is a cross-regional and multidisciplinary research unit, designed to establish a global centre for excellence in the study of international drug policy. It is based at the LSEs United States Centre, at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). By utilising LSEs academic expertise and networks, the IDPU fosters new research, analysis and debate around global drug policies. Working closely with governments and policymakers around the world, we help design, implement and evaluate new policies at local, national, regional and international levels.

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Rethinking Drug Courts: International Experiences of a US Policy ExportEdited by John Collins, Winifred Agnew-Pauley and Alexander Soderholm

Copyright 2019 by LSE International Drug Policy Unit

Published by London Publishing Partnership

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Published in association with the International Drug Policy Unit at the London School of Economics and Political Science

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This book is the result of a project funded by the Open Society Foundations

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ISBN: 978-1-907994-85-2 (hardback)ISBN: 978-1-907994-86-9 (ePDF)ISBN: 978-1-907994-87-6 (ePUB)

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Introduction

By John Collins, Winifred Agnew-Pauley and Alexander Soderholm

Drug courts, or drug treatment courts, or dedicated drug courts, remain a simultaneously popular, derided, evangelised, complex and generally contested intervention. They are almost universally traced back to the Miami Drug Court of the 1980s and are often seen as a direct United States (US) policy export (Csete and Tomasini-Joshi, 2015). Praised by some as revolutionary, benign and indeed lifesaving interventions that quite simply work! (UNODC, 2005), they are criticised by others as mere window dressing (Butler, 2013), with poor outcomes, a questionable and perhaps exploitive international political economy, and ultimately a misdirection of drug treatment efforts towards the criminal justice rather than public health system (Csete and Tomasini-Joshi, 2015). The result, as some judges have highlighted, is a tendency to foster judges undertaking amateur social work or psychiatry (Butler, 2013). Others (several authors in this volume included) view drug courts when underpinned by reasonable assumptions about their role, scale and limits as a small but important piece of a broad diversion-based approach to drug-involved clients within court systems. Some take a more sceptical view. This volume offers a balanced, but broadly revisionist, account of the international evidence on drug courts, pointing to cases where the models have been viewed as a relative success, e.g. in Australia, juxtaposed with other environments where the courts have been portrayed as an international success when, in fact, they are seen domestically as well-meaning but ultimately failed experiments that should end, e.g. in Ireland.

Shane Butler suggests that models termed as drug courts share the following common features.

This volume seeks to wade into the continued debates over drug courts, albeit, we think, from a relatively underserved international comparative perspective. Our aim is twofold. Firstly, to re-examine the evidence base surrounding these contested interventions. Secondly, to provide a basis for evaluation for countries considering importing these interventions. Governments, particularly throughout Latin America, continue with strong support from the US government and key regional institutions to consider, adopt and expand these models, believing them to have an international evidence base that is clear and certain. This volume should at least provide pause for thought, and perhaps a case for rigorous re-evaluation of whether this model suits local needs, whether it is cost-effective, and whether, simply put, its aims could be achieved through other mechanisms. These other mechanisms could be expanded pre-booking diversion programmes, investing in low-threshold community-based social and treatment services, and ultimately moving towards a more decriminalised approach to drugs and drug-involved individuals.

From the outset this volume has been guided by an awareness of the following concerns.

Methodological Overviews

This volume follows a case study based approach, examining the specific experiences and outcomes of the US, Ireland, England, Scotland, Wales, Australia and Brazil, and focuses on the implementation of diversion more broadly. It has been produced as a series of case studies for a number of reasons, perhaps most importantly to highlight that the experience of drug courts is not uniform. Instead, each jurisdiction has a set of experiences unique to its own context. This in itself runs counter to much of the international policy debates, which simply highlight the existence of various jurisdictions with drug court models as de facto proof of the models success. In each case we found a mixed picture ranging from equivocal evidence, to poor outcomes, to internal collapse, to marginal efficacy in specific and limited cases. Each authors case study has been undertaken with a different methodology and approach, with varying takeaways based on national experiences. While the US case study represents a critical evaluation of a seemingly oversold evidence base, the Australian case study provides a sober and encouraging account of the evolution of a diversion and treatment programme embedded within a broad, holistic and complex series of potential interventions supported within the criminal justice system.