excerpts from "The Drug Court Scandal," by Judge Morris Hoffman (North Carolina Law Review, 2000)

7/5/2000 --

Finally, there is an excellent, detailed, well-footnoted analysis of drug courts in the current issue of the North Carolina Law Review. The nearly 100-page article, "The Drug Court Scandal," is written by a state court judge from Denver, Morris B. Hoffman.

The article deals with the research supporting drug courts (and finds it very weak) as well as the problems of creating a permanent drug court bureaucracy, a new justice system for drug offenders and the problem of the bigger net which will result in more people incarcerated. Some key conclusions:

• "We have succumbed to the lure of drug courts, to the lure of their federal dollars, to the lure of their hope, and to the lure of their popularity. Drug courts themsevles have become a kind of institutional narcotic upon which the entire criminal justice system is becoming increasingly dependent."
   
• "... the promise of drug courts do not measure up to their harsh reality. They are compromising deep-seated legal values, including the doctrine of separation of powers, the idea that truth can best be discovered in the fires of advocacy, and the traditional role of judges as quiet, rational arbiters of the truth-finding process. In their mad rush to dispose of cases, drug courts are risking the due process rights off defendants and turning all of us -- judges, prosecutors, and public defenders, alike -- into cogs in an out-of-control case-processing machine.
   
  "And what have they delivered in exchange? Reductions in recidivism are so small that if they exist at all they are statistically meaningless. Net-widening is so large that, even if drug courts truly were effective in reducing recidivism, more drug defendants would continue to jam our prisons than ever before.
   
  "It is time for all of us to take a much harder look at drug courts, at their awkward placement straddled among the three branches, at their true effectiveness, and at their real operational and institutional costs. It is time, especially for judges, to resist the lemming-like dash toward a society in which bedrock legal principles that have served us for generations are sacrificed for the immediate gratification of a political fad."
    
• "We should spend less time feeding the fanaticism of drug courts and more time in an honest debate about the deep moral and social issues inherent in drug use, drug abuse, and drug control."

This an article very worth getting. You can contact the NC Law Review, Chapel Hill, NC at nclrev@unc.edu, 919-962-3926 or 919-962-1527 (fax).