Specialty Courts: Drug Court

Specialty Courts: Drug Court

Introduction

Specialty courts have emerged as a recognized constituent of the judicial landscape internationally. They correspond to a shift away from the adversarial conception of justice towards the analysis that curative jurisprudence can be used to address offender's primary problems. They are problem solving or problem oriented courts that are not subject to single agreed definition or even agreed terms (Freiberg, 2001). They seek to deal with the causes of the criminal behavior as divergent to simply grueling the crime itself. According to Berman and Feinblatt (2001), they address the underlying problems of individual litigants, the structural problems of the justice system and the social problems of communities.

Drug courts are judicially administered courts dockets that handle the cases of nonviolent substance abusing offenders under the adult, juvenile and tribal justice systems. They are problem solving courts that work under a specialized model in which prosecution, law enforcement, social service and mental health communities' work together to assist and facilitate non-violent offenders in finding recovery and becoming productive citizens (US Department of Justice, 2013).

Discussion

Drug court operates on local level to divert non-violent offenders with substance use problems form imprisoning into supervised programs with handling and rigorous standards of accountability. These courts have great significance as it help the participants to recover from addiction and prevent future criminal actions while also lowering down the burden and costs of frequently processing low-level, non-violent offenders through the National's courts, jails and prisons. These courts are differentiated from other courts in a fact that the judge of these courts himself responsible for monitoring of treatment progress and process.

One of the major problems with the drug court staff that limits the effectiveness of the programs is that the employees of the drug courts, in particular, the ones that provide support to the other staff have no or limited knowledge of the purpose of the drug courts. They are not fully aware of the policies and procedures that are to be implemented at the drug court. Some of the drug courts in the United States of America do not even have a drug court coordinator (Larimer, 2002). The ones which did have a coordinator had a coordinator who was very new to the whole process and had no prior knowledge or experience (Anderson & Gadaleto, 2001). The underlying objective of the drug courts was to get the substance offender out of ...