Crime

USM takes lead in drug-treatment research

By Noah Bruce

The United States has the highest prison population in the world. By the end of 1999, there were 1,284,894 people behind bars in federal and state prison. An estimated 90 percent have substance-abuse issues.

Donald Anspach, a professor of sociology at the University of Southern Maine has teamed with Andrew Ferguson, a research analyst with USM, to reduce crime by reducing substance abuse. The US Department of Justice recently awarded the pair a $250,000 grant to assist drug courts in developing improved treatment methods.

Their two-year study will focus on the treatment end of drug courts.

“We know how the courts work,” Anspach says. “It is the treatment that is the black box of drug courts. We don’t know what kind of treatments work with what kind of clients in what situations.”

The researchers believe weekly visits before a judge is a strong factor in keeping drug-court participants clean.

“In regular court, people are treated as non-entities. In drug court people go before a judge who knows them and asks them intimate questions. This sends a big message to the person that we care, that we want to do something different,” said Ferguson.

The drug courts differ from regular courts by focusing on treatment rather than punishment. They were designed “to get junkies out of the revolving door of the criminal justice system,” Anspach says.

Drug court is usually part of a plea-bargain agreement where the defendant agrees to plead guilty and attend the program in lieu of a harsher sentence. Most defendants picked to participate in drug court are non-violent offenders with a criminal record and a history of substance-abuse problems.

The program lasts about 12 months, with participants completing a court-ordered treatment program. Every week they stand before a judge who reviews their case. Successful completion of drug court requires progress towards abstinence and no further criminal activity. Failure means a harsher sentence.

Anspach and Ferguson’s study will focus on drug courts in four areas: Bakersfield, California; Franklin, Louisiana; Kansas City, Missouri; and Creek County, Oklahoma. USM will be the lead institution in a cross-disciplinary team of researchers from the University of Maryland, Correctional Counseling Inc. of Tennessee, and Glacier, a Washington DC nonprofit.

Anspach and Ferguson worked together before when they studied Maine’s first drug court, Project Exodus. The court operated in Cumberland County from 1997 to 1999, but ended when federal money was taken away. Currently there are juvenile drug courts in Biddeford, Portland, West Bath, Bangor, and Augusta. Plans are underway to start adult drug courts with state money in March of 2001.

The researchers believe that by improving the treatment end of drug courts, crime can be reduced.

“If you look in a criminal-justice textbook, the relationship between substance abuse and crime is not addressed,” Anspach says. “This part of the equation needs to be addressed. We’re hoping that by reducing substance abuse, we can reduce crime.”