Working Toward Recovery: The Interplay of Past Treatment and Economic Status in Long-Term Outcomes for Drug-Involved Offenders

Abstract

Research on the relationship between employment and substance use tends to focus on employment lowering use. It is also potentially the case, however, that lowered substance use among addicts may lead to better employment and thus to greater long-term abstinence. In this article, we utilize complementary elements of three mainstream criminological approaches to suggest how therapeutic community-based treatment of drug user(s) during the transition from prison to community may lower clients' levels of substance use and thus increase their likelihood of better economic outcomes. We then use structural equations modeling to demonstrate how this process might play out. The data for this study were collected from 1992 through 1998 from the Delaware Department of Corrections. The study's limitations are noted. This study was IRB-approved and funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

Keywords:

• desistance
• drug user treatment
• therapeutic communities
• employment and crime
• prisoner reentry
• life course
• evidence-based
• social capital

Notes

*A caveat is in order. Treatment can be briefly and usefully defined as a planned, goal-directed change process, which is bounded (culture, place, time, etc.) and can be categorized into professional-based, tradition-based, mutual help–based (AA, NA, etc.) and self-help (“natural recovery”) models. There are no unique models or techniques used with substance users—of whatever types—that aren't also used with non-substance users. In the West, with the relatively new ideology of “harm reduction,” there is now a new set of goals in addition to those derived from/associated with the older tradition of abstinence-driven models as well as new programs such as needle exchange (NEP) and secondary needle exchange (SNEP). Editor's note.

^†There are many disease models, not just one. These include, among others, biochemical-based models, actuarial, functional, experiential, social, political, religious-spirit-animism, economic and consumer-based models. Secondly, each has its own critical definitions, criteria, goals and agendas, constituencies, indicated and contraindicated techniques and services, “healers” and change agents, preferred sites for intervention, temporal parameters, and stakeholders. Each has its unique ethical-associated issues. The recent “medicalization” of “drug use” (substance use disorder) in the DSM “secular Bible” does not sufficiently serve basic diagnostic purposes of gathering needed information in order to make a needed decision or give the minimum of needed evidence-based information: etiology, process, and prognosis. Editor's note.