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Date: April 29, 2024 Mon
Time: 8:41 pm
Time: 8:41 pm
Results for drug courts (kansas)
1 results foundAuthor: Kirven, Mary Beth Title: Kansas Drug Court Feasibility Study Summary: The Kansas Supreme Court contracted with the National Center for State Courts (NCSC) to research the feasibility and practicality of instituting state-wide level management over drug courts within the state. To date, there has been no centralized, statewide effort to encourage the growth of drug courts or exercise any state-level administration and oversight of traditional drug courts within the state. Seven drug courts are currently operating in Kansas – all of them homegrown by court personnel who sought to meet the needs of their individual jurisdictions. Some of these drug courts operate in conjunction with state mandated Senate Bill 123 (SB 123) programs. Kansas has institutionalized the SB 123 programs which provide treatment to adults convicted of a first or second drug possession offense. The question now facing Kansas is whether it should support and institutionalize, at the state level, the development of traditional drug courts. Research accumulated over the last two decades when drug courts first started clearly supports the conclusion that drug courts are effective for high-risk/high needs offenders. Drug courts have been shown to reduce recidivism, reduce costs, and help individuals maintain sobriety. Long term cost reductions are achieved through the avoidance of law enforcement efforts, judicial case processing, and victimization resulting from re-offending. Short-term cost reductions are achieved because individuals are diverted from jail or prison at least for the time that they are in the program. Utilization of traditional drug court models have benefited a significant number of offenders who enter the criminal justice system with serious substance abuse problems and have lowered prison and jail costs by closing the revolving door that seems to trap so many addicts in the cycle of drug abuse and criminal behavior. Drug courts seem to strike the proper balance between the need to protect community safety and the need to improve public health and well being; between the need for treatment and the need to hold people accountable for their actions; between hope and redemption on the one hand and good citizenship on the other. Drug courts keep nonviolent drug-addicted individuals in treatment for long periods of time and supervise them closely, which is the cornerstone of their success. The challenge facing many drug courts now is how can they be sustained and become integrated into the criminal justice system. If drug courts are to be a long term answer to the problem of drug addiction and crime, drug courts must be institutionalized by the state. Institutionalization has been described as “the process by which individual drug courts evolve from separate experimental entities to a statewide network that is stable, far-reaching, reliably funded and closely monitored.”1 Drug courts usually start with an initial grant from the Department of Justice which generally runs for three to five years. After that period the drug court has to find other resources either at the local level or the state level to sustain it. The most precarious time for drug courts is when they have to shift from guaranteed federal funding to local or state funding. More and more, states are stepping up to fund drug courts because drug courts have been shown to effectively reduce recidivism thereby reducing jail and prison bed costs. Whether drug courts should be institutionalized in Kansas is the question before the Supreme Court and the Kansas Sentencing Commission. So far drug courts have developed in Kansas without concerted state assistance and are very limited in the number of people they can serve because of limited resources. If drug courts are institutionalized in Kansas then more with less concern about sustainability because in addition to local and federal funding, state funds would be made available Details: Denver, CO: National Center for State Courts, 2011. 55p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed July 19, 2011 at: http://www.sji.gov/PDF/KS_Drug_Court_Feasibility_Study.pdf Year: 2011 Country: United States URL: http://www.sji.gov/PDF/KS_Drug_Court_Feasibility_Study.pdf Shelf Number: 122108 Keywords: Drug Abuse and CrimeDrug Courts (Kansas)Drug OffendersDrug Treatment |