Background Information on Drug Treatment Courts in the United States
    
     For several decades, drug use has shaped the criminal justice system.  Drug and drug related offenses are the most common crimes in nearly every community.  Drug offenders often move through the criminal justice system in a predictable pattern: arrest, prosecution, conviction, incarceration, release.  In a few days, weeks, months the same person is re-arrested on a new charge and the process begins again.
     The segment of society using drugs between 1950 and 1970 expanded with the crack cocaine epidemic of the mid-1980’s, and the number of drug arrest skyrocketed.  Early efforts to address this problem only complicated the situation.  Initial legislation redefined criminal codes and escalated penalties for drug possession and sales.  These actions did little to address the problems associated with the illicit use of drugs and alcohol.  As law enforcers increased, their efforts America’s prisons were filled creating a major problem for Federal and State correction systems whose responsibility is to house violent and career felons.  Some states scrambled to “build out” of the problem, spending hundreds of millions of dollars on new prisons, only to find that they could not afford to operate or maintain them.
     Other jurisdictions, encouraged and supported by the Federal Government, developed Expedited Drug Case Management systems and were the first to adopt the term “drug court”.  These early efforts were successful in expediting drug case processing by reducing the time between arrest and conviction.  This system allowed existing resources to be used more efficiently, and allowed serious drug trafficking cases to be processed more rapidly.  However, these efforts did little to address the problems of habitual drug use and simply sped up the revolving door from court to jails and prisons and back again.
     Drug Treatment Courts were designed to address judicial concerns associated with drug or alcohol abuse.  Drug Treatment Courts are an outgrowth of the continuing development of community based, team oriented approaches that have their roots in innovative programs developed by pretrial, probation, and parole agencies, as well as treatment based partnerships.