Drug Courts Are A Good Alternative For Drug Offenders By Jessica Huseman

Sharon’s drug addiction began at the age of 22. She started drinking alcohol at parties, not thinking of its future consequences. Drugs soon replaced the alcohol and began using marijuana. She thought it of no harm to her because she did not consider it a “hard” drug like cocaine or morphine. Although she swore to herself to never use such drugs, Sharon soon started using crack cocaine to deal with her personal and family problems. To fund her drug addiction, she worked as a prostitute and a hustler for drug dealers but soon started selling drugs herself to make more of a profit. Police arrested her and sent her to jail. Sharon immediately returned to her old life after her release. In January of 2010, Sharon unknowingly sold to two undercover police …show more content…
. . [c]laims that drug courts have significantly reduced . . . incarceration . . . are unsupported by the evidence” (137). While no statistics exist to prove that drug courts impact the amount of initial arrests, statistics do prove drug courts decrease the number of rearrests. In Jessica Huseman’s article “Drug Courts Are a Good Alternative for Drug Offenders” she reviews several scenarios in which individual or specific areas of drug courts have lowered to percentage of rearrests. In New York City, six drug courts decreased the number drug rearrests by twenty-nine percent for three years after the initial arrest. In Oregon, a single drug court reduced the amount of drug rearrests for thirteen years after the initial arrest by twenty-four perent. A Government Accountability Office found that thirteen out of seventeen drug courts recording “post-program recidivism,” or the tendency for a criminal to commit the same crime after release from a rehabilitation program, measured a decrease between four and twenty-five percent (142). These three instances prove that drug courts really do decrease the percentage of rearrests.