St. Louis Drug Courts Examined

From the St. Louis American:

http://www.stlamerican.com/articles/2010/02/04/news/local_news/localnews...

Excerpt: Missouri is currently the national leader in drug courts – both in numbers with 122, and for being the first and most cutting-edge, said Ray Price, chief justice of Missouri Supreme Court.

In St. Louis, about 80 percent of participants are black. And though graduation rates are below 50 percent, Sullivan said it attests to the fact that the St. Louis drug court does not cherry-pick those who will give them a higher success rate.

“We don’t take easy cases,” Sullivan said. “I can’t say it doesn’t happen other places.”

The St. Louis drug court currently has almost 300 participants.

Drug courts are treatment-based alternatives to prison, youth services facilities, detention centers, jails and standard probation models. In Missouri, drug courts started in 1993 in Jackson County as a response from criminal courts that were seeing the same repeat offenders over and over.

The drug court graduation on Nov. 20, 2009 commemorated 60 graduates for the past year. Many of them spoke about the difficulty of staying in the program for the full course, as well as the difference it made in their lives.