Ben Estep
Drug-related offending is a problem that continues to vex the criminal justice system. The Home Office has estimated that between a third and half of all acquisitive crime (such as shoplifting, theft, or burglary) is committed by users of heroin, cocaine, or crack cocaine. Much of this offending is relatively low-level, but highly persistent, with chronically repeating crime committed to fund addiction.
Often, these cases are not especially complicated legally – courts across the country deal with them every day. But they involve people with complicated lives, and standard justice system responses tend not to generate great results – nearly three out of every five drug misusers convicted go on to re-offend within one year. This is both extremely expensive (costing £14 billion per year, by one estimate) and a challenge to standard practice.
Today, we launch a [case study] of West London Drug Court, which has built on standard practice for drug-related offending in order to better address this problem. As one of our continuing series of Better Courts case studies, this paper briefly describes what sets West London Drug Court apart and identifies lessons that can be drawn from its example.
West London Drug Court seeks to address drug-related crime by using the authority of the court to both support and coerce problem drug users into successfully engaging with treatment. It is built around the Drug Rehabilitation Requirement, a community order requirement mandating drug treatment, accompanied by court supervision, for consenting offenders. This sanction is available to all courts, but West London adds to it in several constructive ways, including:
• Dedicated court sittings, that ensure that drug-related court cases are exclusively dealt with at a dedicated court hearing, overseen by specialist sentencers and attended by treatment providers;
• Consistent post-sentence supervision, with all court clients having their progress regularly reviewed by the same specialist judge or magistrates’ panel that sentenced them, helping the court to more accurately discern progress; and
• Increased collaboration between the range of agencies involved in supervising the offender, including court staff and the local drugs team.
Research evidence drawn from nearly 25 years of drug court operations in the US suggests that these elements may improve outcomes. In particular, emerging evidence points to the importance of judges’ role in holding offenders accountable while engaging in a consistent, meaningful, and procedurally fair process of post-sentence supervision. While we were unable to directly test these effects in West London, our engagement with the court’s stakeholders suggests that this approach can improve offenders’ social inclusion and well-being.
Most mainstream courts do not have specialised court staff, and struggle to have offenders reviewed consistently by the same sentencer. But West London shows how this is possible, even within the current resource and legislative restraints faced by mainstream magistrates’ courts.
While West London doesn’t have all the features of a fully developed drug court model (it notably lacks the ability to swiftly apply intermediate sanctions for non-compliance, and can only offer limited help in accessing supportive services), it valuably demonstrates how courts can improve the way they deal with the people who come before them.
The lives of many problem drug users are a cycle of continual offending, repeated arrests, passages through court, and punishment which offers little opportunity to address their dependence. It is imperative that we explore feasible approaches that might better support both recovery and public safety.