Statewide Evaluation

The Drug Court Discretionary Grant Program is designed to assist states, state courts, local courts, units of local government, and Indian tribal governments in developing and establishing drug courts for substance-abusing adult and juvenile offenders. Drug court programs funded by the Drug Court Discretionary Grant Program are required by law to target nonviolent offenders. The program supports the following activities: adult drug court implementation, single jurisdiction drug court implementation, statewide drug court enhancement, and planning efforts.

The New York State Unified Court System will use statewide enhancement funds to contract with the Center for Court Innovation and The Urban Institute to conduct a statewide evaluation of adult drug courts in New York. The evaluation will produce a groundbreaking study that will examine retention rates and recidivism impacts, as compared with a similarly situated comparison group, among more than 8,000 participants in more than 70 drug courts'far surpassing the numbers in any prior study. The court system will answer the questions: "Do New York's drug courts work? Why? How? and For whom?" In particular, the large sample of courts will enable the court system to test which types of drug courts, based on their policies and practices, elicit the most positive results.

CA/NCF