Contact:
Lorri Montgomery
Director of Communications
National Center for State Courts
757.259.1525
lmontgomery@ncsc.dni.us
New NCSC Publication Highlights
Performance Measurement for Drug Courts
Williamsburg, VA (August 29, 2008) – Measuring the performance of drug courts, and helping drug courts compete with the existing priorities of the judicial system for limited resources, is the topic of the National Center for State Courts’ newest Statewide Technical Assistance Bulletin (vol. 6, 2008). Performance Measurement of Drug Courts: The State of the Art, which was funded by the Bureau of Justice Assistance, brings courts up-to-date on NCSC’s development of Statewide Performance Measurement Systems for the drug courts of several states.
Drug courts emerged as a reform of courts’ traditional practice of treating drug-addicted offenders in a strictly punitive fashion. Drug courts must justify their use of the limited resources provided to state court systems by demonstrating that those resources are used efficiently and that the courts are producing the desired outcomes (e.g., less recidivism) in participants. This need makes performance measurement crucial to the future of drug courts.
In Performance Measurement of Drug Courts: The State of the Art, NCSC:
- Describes efforts to measure the performance of trial courts and assess their applicability to the measurement of drug court performance;
- Describes recent innovations in the area of drug court performance measurement, in particular the National Research Advisory Committee (NRAC) recommendations;
- Describes additional statewide performance measurement systems for drug courts that have been developed through the technical assistance grant from BJA since the last Bulletin was published;
- Describes the results of a survey of state drug court administrators (or their equivalents) to assess the states’ efforts to develop statewide performance measurement systems for their drug courts;
- Describes some of the results of a recently completed assessment of drug court performance in Wyoming, using the NRAC measures; and
- Develops conclusions and recommendations about the state of performance measurement of U.S. drug courts and how to improve it.
Performance Measurement of Drug Courts: The State of the Art is available online on NCSC’s Web site here.
The National Center for State Courts, headquartered in Williamsburg, Va., is a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving the administration of justice by providing leadership and service to the state courts.
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