Despite a growing consensus among scholars that substance abuse treatment is effective at reducing offending, strict eligibility rules and budgetary considerations greatly limit the impact that current models of therapeutic jurisprudence can have on public safety in the United States. A question of pressing importance for U.S. drug policy is whether it is beneficial to expand application of this model to treat every offender in need and, if so, whether a set of evidence-based, going-to-scale strategies can be developed to prioritize participation. The authors use evidence from several sources to construct a synthetic dataset for answering the question: What are the benefits they can reasonably expect by expanding treatment to drug-involved offenders? They combine information from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH) and the Arrestee Drug Abuse Monitoring (ADAM) program to estimate the likelihood of various arrestee profiles having drug addiction or dependence problems. They use the same sources to also develop prevalence estimates of these profiles among arrestees nationally. They use information in the Drug Abuse Treatment Outcome Study (DATOS) to compute expected crime-reducing benefits of treating various types of drug-involved offenders under different treatment modalities. The authors found that annually nearly 1.5 million (probably guilty) arrestees in the U.S. are at risk of abuse or dependence and that treatment alone could avert several million crimes that these individuals would otherwise commit. Results vary by treatment modality and arrestee traits and those results are described herein. Figures, tables, and references (Published Abstract)
Downloads
Similar Publications
- Correctional Officer Fatalities in Line of Duty During 2005 to 2015: A Survival Analysis
- Identifying the Scope and Context of Missing and/or Murdered Indigenous Persons (MMIP) in New Mexico and Improving MMIP Data Collection, Analysis, and Reporting
- Recreational Cannabis Legalization in Washington State: Residents' Opinions and Perceptions of Effects Five Years after Implementation