Optimization of Legal Supervision for Chronic Addict Offenders

• NCJ Number: 126035
• Author(s): M D Anglin; E P Deschenes; G Speckart
• Date Published: 1988
• Length: 16 pages
• Grant Number(s): 86-IJ-CX-0069
• Agencies: NIJ-Sponsored
• Publication Type: Research (Applied/Empirical)

Annotation

This study examined the effect of legal supervision on the criminal behavior of drug addicts, the time course effects of legal supervision, and the differential effects of various types of legal supervision. The subjects consisted of male patients in the California Civil Addicts Program, male addicts admitted to several California county methadone programs, and two groups of male and female methadone maintenance patients interviewed 3.5 years and 6 years after their admission, respectively.

Abstract

The data consisted of information obtained from the criminal justice system and from personal interviews covering narcotics use, employment, criminal behavior, methadone treatment, and legal supervision. The final report summarizes the project outcome which includes four presentations, two published papers, eight papers submitted to various journals, one paper submitted to an edited book, and one paper published as a National Institute of Justice Research in Brief. The subjects of these papers include the efficacy of civil commitment in treating narcotics addiction, the pre-treatment characteristics of legally coerced versus voluntary methadone maintenance admissions, and conditional factors related to legal supervision and treatment. Other papers review criminal careers and the social and economic costs of narcotics addiction, the effects of legal supervision on narcotic use and criminal behavior, the differential effectiveness of legal supervision on narcotic use and criminal behavior, and ethnic and gender differences in legal supervision effectiveness. The longitudinal impact of legal supervision of patterns of alcohol use by narcotic addicts are also investigated. 7 references.