From Whether to How Drug Courts Work: Retrospective Evaluation of Drug Courts in Clark County (Las Vegas) and Multnomah County (Portland), Executive Summary

摘要

This report presents Phase II findings from the national evaluation of the Portland (Multnomah County) and Las Vegas (Clark County) drug courts funded by the National Institute of Justice. With drug courts established shortly after the nation's first was piloted in Miami in 1989, these court systems have operated two of the longest functioning and most highly recognized drug courts in the United States. The dual site research is presented as case studies of two important drug courts applying a common framework for addressing critical evaluation questions, and is not intended as a comparative study of the two sites. The research asks common questions of two different drug courts in depth and tests assumptions of the drug court model. The Phase I report (Goldkamp, White, & Robinson, 2000) traced the developmental histories of the Clark County and Multnomah County drug courts, described important milestones in their implementation, discussed their application of the drug court model, and examined one-year outcomes among successive cohorts of participants and comparison group defendants over time. The design of the two-court evaluation strategy, described in detail in the Phase I report, had several key features. First, the research made use of a drug court typology (Goldkamp, 1999, 2000) as a frame of reference to organize questions and findings according to critical dimensions underlying the drug court model and to improve the external validity of findings. Second, the research considered the evolution of the innovations in each site from a longitudinal perspective, examining the changing context of the drug courts and factors influencing their effectiveness. The longitudinal approach, involving a retrospective evaluation of the courts from their origins, provided a more comprehensive view of the operation of the drug courts than possible using the more common evaluation design that focuses on the operation of courts during one period of time. Third, Phase I findings emphasized the importance of factors external to the drug courts in influencing their input (orientations and enrollments of participants) and output (treatment results and rates of reoffending) of the two drug courts over time.