Evidence-Based Models for Substance Abuse Treatment in the Criminal Justice System

The United States currently incarcerates a higher percentage of its citizens than any other industrialized nation in the world. A majority of Americans who are incarcerated were taking drugs or drinking alcohol, or both, during the commission of their crimes, or were actively engaged in substance-abusing behaviors that resulted in their involvement with the criminal justice system. The costs that are associated with incarcerating these millions of convicts each year are staggering, making the need for cost-effective interventions that can help divert substance-abusing nonviolent offenders from the penal system into other, less expensive community-based alternatives. Likewise, from a strictly pragmatic perspective, treating existing substance abuse among prison populations using methods with proven efficacy just makes good business sense. To this end, this paper compares and contrasts two evidence-based substance abuse treatment models that have demonstrated efficacy in the criminal...
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