Best Practices: Women and Addiction. Challenges for Drug Court Practitioners

摘要

In little over a decade, drug courts have gone from a lone experiment in DadeCounty, Florida, to a national movement with over 580 programs in 47 states, and hundreds more in development. In the early years of the drug court experiment, the question that most needed answering was, 'Do drug courts work.' Today, there is significant evidence to suggest that, in fact, they do: by mandating defendants to judicially-supervised treatment instead of incarceration, drug courts have been able to reduce recidivism among substance-abusing offenders and improve retention rates in treatment. Understandably, drug court practitioners are now asking new questions, ones that relate to fine-tuning and improving drug