This article reports on a study of veterans treatment court data, to determine whether sanctions adhere to the tenets of deterrence theory and whether sanctions that violate those tenets result in changes to clients’ behavior; it includes a literature review and discussion of research methodology, results, and implications for practice.
The author of this article reviews the available literature on the effects of sanction swiftness and certainty, and addresses a lack of examination into the element of sanction proportionality and its relationship to client noncompliance. The article emphasizes the importance of sanction proportionality to its effectiveness because clients may escalate their offending behavior if they perceive the following: that the sanctioning process is unfair or unequitable across participants; or if minor violations are punished the same as severe violations. Along those lines, the research study being reported in this article investigated three questions: how practitioners ranked common infractions within a problem-solving court; if the imposed sanctions were proportional to the severity of the infraction; and whether disproportionality in the sanctioning process led to an escalation of client noncompliance. The research results demonstrated the importance of considering proportionality in sanctioning grids within problem-solving courts, from a sanctioning as well as equity viewpoint.