Suchergebnisse

Drug treatment courts are challenged by the ongoing trend of marijuana legalization. In states where it is legal for adult citizens to consume marijuana for medical and recreational purposes, treatment courts need to determine whether participants should be allowed to consume or possess marijuana. By analyzing the written policies of treatment courts in states that have legalized recreational and medical marijuana, this study explores how treatment courts address such challenges. The review shows a large percentage of drug treatment courts have yet to clearly communicate their marijuana policies with the participants in writing. However, among the drug treatment courts that have established marijuana-specific policies, the vast majority of courts continue to ban the use of marijuana while a few courts allow medical marijuana use on an individual basis.

Drug courts solve problems, namely, reducing drug use and recidivism. The current research attempts to answer the question of how to ensure program fidelity and therefore optimize the efficacy of drug courts. Justice professionals and scholars have recognized that there are multiple internal and external threats that could undermine the drug court operation. At this point, the mechanism(s) by which threaten factors affect drug court program fidelity has been neither theoretically modeled nor empirically tested. In the present study, using a national sample and the Structural Regression Analysis (SRA), we found collaboration and judicial decision making are the most important factors for maintaining drug court program fidelity. This is because collaboration and judicial decision making can mediate the threats and challenges from many quarters, including the lack of information sharing and evaluation, treatment, operational support, and community and political support.

In 2012, Washington State legalized the production, sale, and possession of marijuana through Initiative 502. Advocates of legalization argued that it would decrease the jail population and reduce the disproportionate incarceration of minorities, reasoning that the police would refocus their resources on other matters. In order to evaluate this assumption, we examined jail booking data using a set of interrupted time-series regression models. Our findings indicate that jail population trends differ among counties across time and with respect to impacts on minorities and women. With regard to ethnic and racial disproportionate impact, there appears to be little positive change.