Dependency Drug Court: Evaluation Report

• NCJ Number: 241056
• Date Published: December 2012
• Length: 18 pages
• Agencies: OJJDP-Sponsored
• Publication Type: Program/Project Evaluation

Annotation

This report presents the results of an evaluation of San Francisco Superior Court's Dependency Drug Court project.

Abstract

Highlights from the evaluation of San Francisco Superior Court's Dependency Drug Court (DDC) project include the following: of program participants surveyed about the program, 48 percent were greatly satisfied with DDC services, while 26 percent were somewhat satisfied; 52 percent reported that the staff greatly respected all program participants, while only 9 percent indicated that staff were respectful of all participants; 44 percent reported that staff greatly understood their needs and concerns, while 26 percent felt the staff only somewhat understood their needs and concerns; and 48 percent of participants surveyed indicated that the program had greatly improved their quality of life, while 52 percent of participants surveyed indicated that program participation greatly helped with their own recovery. This report presents the results of an evaluation conducted to determine the effectiveness of San Francisco Superior Court's DDC project. Over the 2-year length of the project, the DDC served 83 clients, of which 23 participated in the survey to evaluate the success of the program. The report highlights the problems encountered by the researchers in evaluating the program. The researchers found that the superior court's existing database and management information system (MIS) was inadequate to capturing the data necessary to conduct the evaluation, collaboration between city and county departments was not adequate for obtaining data, lack of key leadership during project implementation, personnel changes to the superior court system, and the need to extract and evaluate data from four different data systems resulted in significant obstacles due to different legal, consent, confidentiality, and resource issues. Recommendations for improving data collection strategies are discussed, in addition to questions for additional research. Tables, figures, and appendix