DRUG COURTS DON'T WORK

They Turn Neutral Judges into Cheerleaders, Substitute
Parents.

There are only two problems with drug courts. They don't work, and
they turn judges into intrusive agents of the Nanny State.

Independent evaluations of drug courts have been mixed, but many show
that drug courts have no, or very little, impact on re-arrest
recidivism. In Denver, for example, where I sit as a trial judge, an
evaluation of our drug court done by the insiders who ran it claimed
enormous reductions in recidivism. But when independent evaluators
from the University of Denver looked at the program, they found that
it reduced recidivism from a depressing 58% down to a still depressing
53%. Even that 5-point drop was well within the study's margin of error.

But it's not just that drug courts don't work, or don't work well.
They have the perverse effect of sending more drug defendants to
prison, because their poor treatment results get swamped by an
increase in the number of drug arrests. By virtue of a phenomenon
social scientists call "net-widening," the very existence of drug
courts stimulates drug arrests.

Police are no longer arresting criminals, they are trolling for
patients. Denver's drug arrests almost tripled in the two years after
we began our drug court. At the end of those two years, we were
sending almost twice the number of drug defendants to prison than we
did before drug court.

Drug courts also turn judges from neutral magistrates into a
combination of treatment cheerleader and substitute parent. When we
try to treat addiction either as a simple disease or a matter of
criminal choice, and drug users as moral inpatients, the only thing we
accomplish is to create a dangerous and untrained judiciary that
thinks it can intrude into the lives of citizens for as long as it
takes to cure them.

As a state felony trial judge, I understand the scourge of drugs as
well as anyone. But trying to cover up our national schizophrenia over
drug policy with the veneer of ineffective, even counterproductive,
drug courts does no good, except perhaps to make judges feel better
when we send our treatment failures to prison.