The purpose of this literature review is to prove that drug court programs are an effective alternative to incarceration for people struggling with substance abuse issues. According to the Bureau of Justice statistics seventeen percent of prisoners at the state level were incarcerated due to drug related crimes. Eighteen percent of federal cases were related to drugs (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2004). According to Lutze and Van Wormer the drug court model was formulated in response to the revolving cycle involved with substance addiction and crime. This model incorporated many different aspects of the judicial system such as judges, lawyers, probation officers, and social workers as well as traditional substance abuse treatment concepts. …show more content…
The idea behind these program was to help treat the offenders for their substance abuse disorders while still holding them accountable for the crime that they had committed (Lutze & Wormer, 2013). Many studies have been conducted in order to assess the effectiveness of drug court programs across the country. In a qualitative study done by Gallagher 100 participants of the drug court program were examined. This study found that of the drug court participants, seventy-nine percent were not rearrested in the follow-up period. Twenty-one percent of those participants were rearrested (Gallagher, 2014). Similarly, Brown found that in a matched cohort study comparing traditional prison sentencing to drug court programs it was shown that there was significantly less recidivism in the drug court participants than in the offenders that were sentenced to jail or prison time. In this study 137 drug court participants were matched with offenders that had been sentenced traditionally. It was shown that the recidivism rate for drug court participants was only thirty percent, whereas the traditionally sentenced participants had a forty-seven percent recidivism rate. Brown also examined the time between program completion and participants committing a new crime. In the drug court participants, the mean time was 614 days, and in the traditionally sentenced participants the average time was 463 days (Brown,