Electronic monitoring devices during substance use treatment are associated with increased arrests among women in specialty courts

ABSTRACT

Background: Electronic monitors (EMs) are commonly used as a sanction and to improve compliance with substance use treatment and reduce re-arrest in criminal justice settings. However, there is minimal evidence for their effectiveness, especially among women.

Objectives: We examined whether the use of EMs (i.e., devices placed on one’s body to encourage treatment compliance) increased rates of substance use treatment completion, and as a result, reduced re-arrest and substance use among women offenders.

Methods: We sampled 114 women referred to residential substance use treatment and a subsample of 102 women charged with felonies. Logistic regression models accounting for clustering of time within person were fit.

Results: Overall, EMs were associated with 3.13 greater odds of re-arrest after accounting for criminogenic risk indicators; however, no association was detected among women charged with felonies only. Women who were assigned to EMs were significantly less likely to report illicit drug use in the past 30 days, and women charged with felonies were less likely to report both alcohol and illicit drug use in the past 30 days. There was no association between EM assignment and treatment completion or positive urinalysis result.

Conclusion: EM provision did not enhance the retention of women in residential treatment and the presence of an EM was associated with a more than tripling in the odds of re-arrest. Results also suggest that EM use for women in Specialty Courts may have some limited utility in reducing substance use; however, the mechanism driving this effect remains unclear.

KEYWORDS:

• Electronic monitors
• Specialty Court
• drug Court
• substance use relapse
• women
• recidivism

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank Ms. Marjan Cobbaert and Mary (Cassie) Springer for their contributions to this project.

Conflicts of interest

There are no conflicts of interest to disclose from any authors.

Disclosure

Funding for this study was provided by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) grant H29 TI026072. A partial analysis of these data with a subset of the sample (n=32) was previously published with restricted public access (explained further below). The reference for this abstract is Cobbaert, M.A., “The Effect of Ankle Monitors during Drug Treatment on Drug Treatment Completion, Substance Abuse and Recidivism in Women in Dallas, Texas” (2017). Texas Medical Center Dissertations (via ProQuest). AAI10270837. An abstract only is available at https://digitalcommons.library.tmc.edu/dissertations/AAI10270837. Because the authors used protected recidivism and urinalysis data for these analyses, all publications must be approved through multiple parties per a mutually agreed upon data sharing agreement. Although we did seek approval to publish Ms. Cobbaert’s analysis, we recognized that the sample size was insufficient to adequately power the study and did not wish to disseminate results based upon incomplete data. Therefore, only the abstract from Ms. Cobbaert’s limited analysis is available online. The present study reports a more complete analysis with expanded outcomes and controls for criminogenic risk, along with a larger sample.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the SAMHSA [H29 TI026072].