Evaluating Australia's First Drug Court: Research Challenges

• NCJ Number: 203692
• Author(s): Karen Freeman
• Date Published: 2003
• Length: 7 pages
• Corporate Author: New South Wales Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research
• Sale Source: New South Wales Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research; NCJRS Photocopy Services
• Publication Format: Document (Online)
• Publication Type: Program/Project Evaluation
• Language: English
• Country: Australia
• Note: Paper presented at the Evaluation in Crime and Justice: Trends and Methods Conference convened by the Australian Institute of Criminology, held in Canberra, March 24-25, 2003.

Annotation

This report describes the evaluation processes integrated with the piloting of the first Australian drug court begun in 1998 in New South Wales, exploring the methodological and operational challenges faced by the evaluators and how these challenges were managed.

Abstract

The evaluation initially consisted of three studies. One study assessed the cost-effectiveness of the drug court in reducing offending, compared with the mainstream criminal justice system. A second study investigated improvements to health and well-being while on the program. The third study monitored key aspects of the court's operation. A fourth study, a process evaluation, was not part of the original evaluation plan, but was added later. Because the evaluation relied heavily on the collection of data by the court, one of the challenges for the evaluation was to engage the members of the drug court staff in consistent and accurate recording of evaluation data. There were varying levels of interest and support for the evaluation, with a number of concerns raised. The evaluation placed a substantial demand on the workload of the court staff and team members. Some court staff apparently lacked trust in evaluation researchers, based largely on the concern that a reliance on quantitative evaluation would ignore many of the valuable achievements of the program. The inclusion of a qualitative process evaluation helped to address this issue by providing a forum in which various views could be expressed and by identifying some of the achievements of the court that were not revealed elsewhere. There was concern among some team members about the random allocation of limited treatment places. The final design required random allocation to treatment only on days when there were more people eligible to process to the detoxification and assessment stage of intake than there were beds available in the detoxification unit. Some implementation challenges in the health and well-being study were access to participants, follow-up interviews for people, the high rate of dropping out of the program, and the measure of drug use. Some challenges faced when reporting the findings were reporting pressures and outcome expectations. Although the challenges of integrating the evaluation with the court's operation posed difficulties at times, the overall result was the inclusion of a diverse range of stakeholders in the evaluation, leading to different perspectives, and the building of relationships between practitioners and researchers, creating opportunities for conducting future research.