Enhancing Residential Treatment for Drug Court Participants

Abstract

In this study, the authors describe and evaluate the impact of increased access to residential treatment added to traditional drug court services in Orange County, California, with a goal of increasing program retention, successful completion, and graduation rates for a high-risk drug offender population participating in drug court between January 2004 and March 2005. Data were gathered from various sources, including the drug court management information system (MIS) and probation records, and the health care agency that provided case management services to drug court participants. The results suggest that increasing the drug court's capacity to adapt treatment for participants in need of a higher level of care was related to positive outcomes. Limitations of this study include the design that is susceptible to uncontrolled influences of extraneous variables such as changes in policy. This research encourages further examination of these variables in alternate settings to determine the extent to which these strong but preliminary results are generalizable.