This report describes the results of a process, outcome, and cost evaluation of the Cass County/Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe Wellness Court, with the overall goal of carrying out a credible and rigorous evaluation of Minnesota’s driving-while-intoxicated court programs.
This report presents the results of a process, outcome, and cost evaluation of the Cass County/Leech Lake Band of the Ojibwe Wellness Court, in Minnesota. The purpose of performing a process evaluation was to establish whether the driving-while-intoxicated (DWI) court program has the basic components needed to be effective; the main purpose of performing an outcome evaluation was to determine whether the DWI court program has improved participant outcomes; and the main purposes of a cost analysis for this study were to determine the cost of the program and to determine if the costs due to criminal justice and other outcomes were lower due to DWI court participation. The cost evaluation was designed to address the following four study questions: how much each DWI court program cost and what the average investment per agency was in a DWI court participant case; what the one- and two-year cost impacts on the criminal justice system and the average cost of criminal justice recidivism per agency for DWI court participants compared to the traditional court system; what the cost-benefit ratio is for investment in the DWI court; and what the cost of the lag time between arrest and DWI court entry is. The report describes evaluation details and outcomes in each of the three sections corresponding to the process, outcome, and cost evaluations.