Do DWI Courts Work? an Empirical Evaluation of a Texas DWI Court

Abstract

Driving while intoxicated (DWI) courts have recently gained traction as a potential solution to the problem of repeat DWI offending. Unfortunately, there are only a handful of peer-reviewed studies that have examined their effectiveness. Thus, the current study compared DWI court graduates to a group of similar offenders who completed probation. Rearrest outcomes were examined at 6 and 12 months postrelease and survival analyses were conducted to determine whether DWI court treatment was able to delay rearrest. Results indicated that DWI court was no more effective than probation. These findings suggest that it is premature to endorse DWI courts for reducing DWI recidivism.

KEYWORDS:

• DWI court
• evaluation
• outcome
• propensity score matching
• recidivism

Notes

*p < .05.

*p < .05. **p < .10.

It should be noted that the strategy of examining DWI court completers could potentially bias results in favor of finding program success. In this regard, the current analysis may be viewed as a more liberal test of the effectiveness of the current DWI court program.

For a complete list of items, see Appendices A and B.

Alternative matching procedures were employed to determine their effect on the overall pattern of findings presented here. Specifically, the single nearest neighbor was selected without allowing for replacement. Although this method produces larger probability differences between the treatment and control matches, it creates a control group with unique cases (due to nonreplacement) and thus weights each case equally. This alternative approach produced the same pattern of findings.