Drug court refers to a special court that is given a duty to handle cases involving substance-abusing crooks via comprehensive regulation, treatment services, drug testing, and instant sanctions and encouragements. This court provides people facing unlawful charges for drug utilization and possession with a chance to get into a substance abuse healing schedule in lieu of straight prison time. Drug court schedules bring the full power of all interveners, i.e. community leaders, law enforcement, vocational and educational experts, judges, defense counsel, prosecutors, substance abuse diagnosis specialists, correctional officers just to mention but a few. This is to ensure that they help the crook to deal with his or her substance-abuse difficulty from every probable angle. The aim of drug courts is to ensure they acquire reduction in substance-abuse amid crooks, recidivism and raise the probability of successful recovery. However, the conditions of a drug court are rigorous since the journey to recovery is not easy. A candidate has to be tested frequently, to ensure that he or she visits the court regularly, and to attend the healing programs so as to abide by the requirements of the dug court. Thorough research and evaluation have confirmed that, in places where drug courts are employed, regularities with procedures and models are established based on fair studies; they minimize recidivism and substance-abuse amid high-jeopardy substance abusing crooks. These courts that are well-established also raise the probability of successful recovery. This is done while minimizing the cost to the community below the historic charges of attending to these difficulties in the unlawful justice system. On the contrary, other scholars argue that drug courts are resources that are utilized in a wrong way and they have no importance to the society. The aim of this essay is to assess the effectiveness of these drug courts. It also seeks to explore and discover the purposes of these courts. This paper will address the below articles to acquire reliable sources of the issues to be discussed. The first article is Painting the Current Picture: National Report on Drug Courts and Other Problem Solving Court Programs in the United States by Huddleston, Marlowe, and Casebolt (2008). The second documentary is an article by Addiction and Mental Health Research LaboratoryDrug treatment courts (DTCs) (2009). The last article that unfolds this topic of drug courts is Australian Responses to Illicit Drugs: Drug Courts by the Australian Institute of Criminology (2014).
Painting the Current Picture: National Report on Drug Courts and Other Problem Solving Court Programs in the United States by Huddleston, Marlowe, and Casebolt.
This article explores effectiveness of drug courts in the areas that it is practiced in. There is a large number of crimes committed by individuals not because they are willing, but because of the influence and pressure of drugs. According to Huddleston et al., condemning the crooks who operate under the influence of a drug is a waste of time. In their article, they compare it with treating symptoms of a disease instead of treating the disease. They argue that most of these crimes are committed because of the influence and hence it is important to handle the route cause, which is the drug. In this case, they offer examples of countries that practice drug courts referring to them as successful and better placed in fighting drug taking habits. In this article, the authors argue that drug courts promote individual recovery, which eventually promotes family and national development. In this article, the authors demonstrate how drug courts reduce individual drug reliance through training victims on how they adopt the measures of stopping drug usage step by step. At the same time, they argue that drug courts assist in reducing the overall rate of recidivism. It is evident that drug courts minimize congestion in prisons since most drug crooks are engaged in different programs. Moreover, on acquiring therapy, victims are able to learn and become important people in the nation development (Huddleston, Marlowe, & Casebolt, 2008).