This paper reports on a meta-analytical examination of juvenile drug treatment court program participants’ recidivism rates and substance use outcomes, and the variability in those effects; it lays out the research methodology and findings, noting implications for future policy and practice.
The authors meta-analytically examined program graduation rates among juvenile drug treatment court (JDTC) participants, the effects of JDTCs on recidivism and substance use outcomes, and the variability in these effects. They systematically searched for controlled evaluations examining the effects of U.S.-based JDTCs relative to traditional juvenile adjudication and used mixed-effects meta-regressions with robust variance estimates. They identified 55 eligible samples (providing data from 12,310 participants); the overall certainty of evidence was low or very low. The average graduation rate among JDTC participants was 54.74 percent (95 percent confidence interval [CI] [0.50, 0.59]). JDTCs had modest beneficial effects on general recidivism assessed during court supervision (odds ratio [OR] = 1.38, 95 percent CI [1.03, 1.84]) but these effects did not persist after program completion. Correlational analyses suggest JDTCs may be effective when program enrollment and service provision are better tailored to youth’s treatment needs. However, due partly to implementation failures, JDTCs may have minimal to no effects on post-program recidivism. (Published Abstract Provided)