This special issue celebrates the 30-year anniversary of the creation of the first problem-solving or specialty court in the United States. As is well known, the initial tribunal, a drug court, was initiated in Miami-Dade County in 1989. As the articles in this issue of Victims & Offenders show, problem-solving courts have diversified to cover a myriad of special populations and have spread globally. One count in 2014 placed the number of such courts at nearly 4,400, a figure that undoubtedly has increased since that time. The public appears to endorse this development, with a 2017 national survey reporting that 8 in 10 Americans support most types of problem-solving courts. In fact, no social or political group seems to oppose this reform.
Why is the problem-solving model so appealing? Its attractiveness likely resides in two considerations. First, in the era of mass imprisonment and crowded prisons, specialty courts offered a pragmatic way of retaining offenders in the community. Some offenders—initially the drug addicted and then other special populations (e.g., the mentally ill, the homeless)—did not seem to belong in the traditional justice system. Lacking predatory propensities, they were prime candidates for diversion from prison and into the community.
Second, the design of this model was eminently sensible. Building on the rehabilitative ideal and its justification for individualized treatment, this reform was predicated on the positivist view that people become criminals because they have special “problems.” Logic thus requires that such problems be “solved.” One option for doing so is to create a system similar to specialists in medicine: have a knee problem, see an orthopedic surgeon; have a herniated disk, go to a back doctor. In criminal justice, it would now be possible to create courts that would specialize in solving the problems of a given category of offenders. Those abusing substances could be directed to drug courts, those manifesting psychiatric symptoms could be directed to mental health courts, those back from military deployment and perhaps suffering the trauma of combat could be directed to veterans treatment courts, and so on. Judges would now head the treatment team and use their discretion to develop an effective intervention calibrated for each individual defendant. Alas, if some proved incorrigible, the option remained to return them to a traditional court or to incarcerate them. Rehabilitation—problem solving—was a priority, but public safety would not be sacrificed.
Implicit in this model is that specialized courts, which offered treatment and held offenders accountable, would solve problems more effectively than processing these troubled souls through the regular court system. In the crowded world of criminal justice, such offenders would face adversarial justice, an impersonal judge, and a sanction intended to punish, not help. Advocates of problem-solving courts thus claimed that a model specializing in what ails different categories of offenders would be best positioned to reduce their recidivism. In the emergent era of evidence-based corrections, this appeal to doing what works proved irresistible.
As the history of justice reforms teaches us, however, implementing persuasive models is a daunting task marked by unanticipated consequences. One danger of problem-solving courts is that these initiatives, in their many varieties, have spread widely before their efficacy has been demonstrated. Promising evaluations, especially with regard to adult drug courts, exist and offer a measure of confidence to reformers. Still, hubris too often has prevailed when humility was in order. Best practices, including the impact of key components of the problem-solving model, have not been empirically verified. Many courts now exist based on good intentions, but we all know to which “paved road” those can lead.
Further, complex justice issues remain to be resolved. Adversarial justice is fraught with punitiveness and seems inferior to the quest for treatment inherent in problem-oriented courts. Such courts manifest an obvious empathy for offenders and a desire to fix their criminogenic needs. But when offenders fail to navigate court-imposed conditions—which occurs about half the time—they are stigmatized as “noncompleters” and receive a traditional sanction. Some evidence exists that their stays in prison are longer than if they had never been seduced by the promise of special treatment extended by problem-solving courts.
The articles in this special issue shed light on the opportunities and challenges facing problem-solving courts as they approach the closure of their third decade in existence. It is clear that such specialty tribunals remain a popular reform that will continue to diversify in modality and in countries of origin in the immediate future. Taken together, the contributions in this issue provide a fascinating tour across the contemporary status of this growing roster of problem-oriented courts. Whether for practitioners or scholars, there is thus much to be gained by visiting the articles that follow.