NO QUICK FIX, BUT COURT IS PAYING ITS WAY

The Drug Court Might Not Be Achieving Miraculous Results, But At Least It's
A Start, Writes Ross Gittins.

Sometimes I despair over our attitude to crime. The radio shock jocks and
much of the rest of the media make a handsome living stirring up the
public's fear and anger, while demanding that the politicians Do Something!
The solutions urged on the pollies are usually those that gratify the
emotions without taxing the brain: double the penalties, crack down on
lenient judges, put more cops on the beat.

For their part, the politicians seek to hang on to their jobs by being seen
to be responding to the public's concerns. They implement the popular
solutions - or, at least, whatever responses they calculate will win the
(fleeting) approval of the shock jocks and their listeners.

The pollies are much more focused on managing the voters' perceptions of
the crime problem than they are on actually reducing it. If the seeming
solutions the public says it wants are hugely expensive without actually
working - well, it's only taxpayers' money.

And the worst of it is, sometimes I wonder whether the public really cares
about the way the media and the pollies take it for a ride on crime. Maybe
older people enjoy worrying about crime in the same way younger people
enjoy watching horror movies.

In the case of drug-related crime, however, many people do seem to be
demanding that the pollies try something other than more of the same. The
politicians are under greater pressure to experiment with new and radical
approaches, such as drug courts, injecting rooms or heroin trials.

These ideas are so controversial they're almost invariably set up as pilot
projects. And the beauty of pilot projects is that you have to undertake a
study of their effectiveness to see if the project should be expanded or
abandoned.

So, here, despite all the rude things I've just said about pollies, I have
to give the Carr Government its due. When it began its experiment with a
drug court in 1999, it commissioned a very careful study of the project's
cost effectiveness. And last week, without any pussyfooting, it published
the study's findings.

It's the first time in Australia than any crime prevention policy has been
subjected to an evaluation of its cost effectiveness. The study was
conducted by Dr Don Weatherburn and colleagues at the NSW Bureau of Crime
Statistics and Research, with help from the Centre for Health Economics
Research and Evaluation at the University of Technology, Sydney.

The drug court idea comes from America, where it's used extensively. Its
objective is simply to reduce the amount of drug-related crime. The Drug
Court takes repeat offenders pleading guilty to a drug-taking or
drug-related offence (mainly stealing to get money for drugs) and suspends
their sentence while it puts those judged suitable - and who are willing -
through a drug treatment program lasting about a year.

Those who complete the program successfully have their sentence revoked,
whereas those whose participation is terminated because of lack of
co-operation generally go off to jail to serve out their sentence.

But this is like no court you've ever seen (except, maybe, Judge Judy's).
Far from delivering their verdicts from the bench before the offenders are
hustled out the door, the judges head a team composed of the police
prosecutor, the legal aid lawyer, the probation and parole officer and
someone from the Health Department.

The team maintains regular contact with the participants in the program,
reviewing their progress and dispensing praise and encouragement or rebukes
and warnings, rewards or punishments.

For the first three months of the program, participants are required to do
at least two urine tests a week, have one home visit and one other visit
with their probation officer each week, and come before the Drug Court for
a "report-back" appearance once a week. The punishment for, say, failing a
urine test might be clocking up three days in jail - to be served once the
total reaches a certain level - but the reward for getting back on the
wagon might be having the previous punishment wiped.

The general reward for progress is less intensive supervision, but this is
supplemented by gifts of (I'm not making this up) skin-care products or
football tickets.

It all sounds so well intentioned and sensible that I'm sorry to have to
tell you the results of the evaluation are less than miraculous. They hinge
on comparing the performance of a group of participants in the program with
a randomly selected control group of offenders who were eligible to
participate, but for whom there wasn't room. The control group proceeded
straight to jail, as per normal. It turns out that, for almost all kinds of
theft and drug offences, it took longer for the treated group to reoffend,
on average, than it took the jailed group - though not by much.

In the case of shoplifting, however, about 20 per cent of the jailed group
had been apprehended committing an offence after eight months spent out of
custody, whereas for the treated group it was only 9 per cent.

And for possession of heroin or other opiates, about 10 per cent of the
jailed group had been apprehended after 10 months out of custody, compared
with only 3 per cent for the treated group.

The next question is, how much more did it cost the taxpayer to achieve
this modest reduction in crime?

The cost for an individual placed on the Drug Court program was $144 a day,
compared with $152 a day for individuals punished in the usual way. That
difference is too small to make much of. The best you can say is that the
Drug Court was no more costly than the conventional approach.

In terms of cost effectiveness, however, the court approach was
cost-effective in reducing the frequency of offending. For each shoplifting
offence averted by conventional means, it cost $4900 more than it did using
the Drug Court program. And for each possession-of-heroin offence averted,
the conventional approach cost no less than $19,000 more.

A few other points in the Drug Court's favour. Remember that it deals only
with the hard cases - the recidivists - ignoring the first offenders. Why?
Because, thankfully, a high proportion of them learn their lesson and never
reoffend.

Note, too, that the study ignored many less direct and harder-to-measure
benefits and cost savings, such as the reduced demand on the health system
and the justice system over the longer term, the reduced insurance claims
and the better health and wellbeing enjoyed by successful participants in
the program.

As well, the study revealed that a disproportionate amount of the costs of
the program were generated by the high proportion of participants - 43 per
cent - whose involvement was terminated because of their failure to
co-operate. Selecting participants more carefully - and giving failing
participants fewer "second" chances - should make the program significantly
more cost-effective.

So, though the Drug Court is no magic answer, it's worth persisting with.
It does a modest amount of good for no extra cost - which is more than you
can say for a lot of the things pollies do.