NCJ Number
223777
Date Published
2008
Length
189 pages
Annotation
Based on just over 5 years of field research in three drug courts in a southeastern State, this book documents how drug-court professionals assist drug offenders in becoming drug-free and law abiding.
Abstract
The main theme of the research findings is that the drug court team (judges, administrators, drug counselors, lawyers, and others) has the challenge of deciding whether drug offenders are primarily willing drug users committed to a deviant, criminal lifestyle with little, if any, desire to kick their habit, or are drug addicts who have the will and want the help to abstain from using drugs while creating a normative, constructive, law-abiding life. In essence, the drug team constantly assessed the moral identity of the drug-court client. The drug team decided whether the client was motivated, whether he/she was learning and applying the tools offered them, whether he/she was staying drug-free, whether the client’s performance was worthy of ”graduation,“ whether the client had violated program regulations, and whether the client was sufficiently unworthy to be removed from the program. In judging drug-court clients by these criteria, the drug-court professionals gave them “moral identities” of varying worth. Critics of drug courts argue that such a judgmental subculture is too intrusive and violates clients’ due-process rights. In the three drug courts involved in this research, however, this tendency was counterbalanced by the reluctance of the staff to give up on the drug users. Staff only lost hope after clients violated program requirements numerous times. This does not mean that the good intentions and professional competence of drug-court staff will guarantee that mistakes will not be made and that the legal right of offenders may not be violated. This is also the case, however, in criminal court as well. 162 references and appended details of the research methodology