They’re Called “Specialty Courts” for a Reason: A Criminologically-informed and Evidence-based Reply to Lucas (2020)

ABSTRACT

We recently published an article in Victims & Offenders in which we argued that: (1) the generality of deviance is real (i.e., offenders rarely specialize in any form of criminal or deviant behavior), (2) specialty courts typically assume – either implicitly or explicitly – that offenders do, in fact, specialize primarily in a particular form of criminal behavior, and (3) that there is thus a mismatch between a well-documented criminological reality and the administrative reality of specialty courts. Lucas recently took issue with our arguments and claimed that specialty courts are well-run, evidence based, and sufficiently flexible to be consistently effective at reducing recidivism, and that our relative pessimism is rooted in our “misinterpretation” of the evidence we cite. We find no merit in either of his arguments and we present here a criminologically-informed and evidence-based discussion of the generality of deviance and specialty courts.

KEYWORDS:

• Specialty courts
• offending specialization and diversity
• evidence-based corrections

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the Editors of Victims and Offenders for the opportunity to respond with this piece.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The bulk of the disagreement emerging from Lucas’s (2020) piece and ours concerns drug courts – the primary form that specialty courts take and the one that has served as the conceptual and administrative model for other specialty courts. Thus, our response here is focused primarily on the drug court model.

2. In policy circles generally – and in the area of drug courts specifically – the idea that “drugs cause crime” (or at least that drugs are the primary facilitator of criminal behavior) is viewed with near religious faith (Baum, 1996; Mosher & Akins, 2021; Walters et al., 1996). But the actual research says otherwise. Developmental research in criminology has long noted, for example, that criminal behavior often precedes substance use (Chaiken & Chaiken, 1990; Menard et al., 2001; Pudney, 2003), that the link between drug use and crime is stronger among adolescents and steadily weakens with age (Elliott et al., 1989; Huizinga et al., 1989), and that once one’s underlying criminal propensity has been controlled for, the drugs-crime link is rendered effectively spurious (Felson et al., 2008; McBride & McCoy, 1993). None of that is good news for a specialty court model that assumes that treating one’s drug use will be a cure for their more “general” criminal behavior.

3. At best, some drug courts operate on the more general principle that such offenders are often entrenched in a broader pattern of “risky lifestyles” (Latessa & Reitler, 2014; Yelderman, 2016), and that if treatment protocols are able to target those high-risk choices (e.g., with respect to peer associations, unstructured leisure time), then they may be in a position to address the root causes of the individual’s criminal behavior.

4. This heterogeneity is revealed by the statistically significant Q, I², and Ƭ²-statistics for studies of juvenile drug courts when the outcomes are general recidivism (p. 502), drug recidivism (p. 504), and drug use (p. 505).