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6 J. Experimental Criminology 1 (2010)

handle is hein.journals/jexpcrm6 and id is 1 raw text is: J Exp Criminol (2010) 6:1-33
DOI 10.1007/si1292-010-9088-2
Simulated evidence on the prospects of treating
more drug-involved offenders
Avinash Singh Bhati - John K. Roman
Published online: 15 March 2010
© Springer Science+Business Media B.V 2010
Abstract Despite a growing consensus among scholars that substance abuse
treatment is effective at reducing offending, strict eligibility rules and budgetary
considerations greatly limit the impact that current models of therapeutic
jurisprudence can have on public safety in the United States. A question of pressing
importance for U.S. drug policy is whether it is beneficial to expand application of
this model to treat every offender in need and, if so, whether a set of evidence-based,
going-to-scale strategies can be developed to prioritize participation. We use
evidence from several sources to construct a synthetic dataset for answering the
question: What are the benefits we can reasonably expect by expanding treatment to
drug-involved offenders? We combine information from the National Survey on
Drug Use and Health (NSDUH) and the Arrestee Drug Abuse Monitoring (ADAM)
program to estimate the likelihood of various arrestee profiles having drug addiction
or dependence problems. We use the same sources to also develop prevalence
estimates of these profiles among arrestees nationally. We use information in the
Drug Abuse Treatment Outcome Study (DATOS) to compute expected crime-
reducing benefits of treating various types of drug-involved offenders under different
treatment modalities. We find that annually nearly 1.5 million (probably guilty)
arrestees in the U.S. are at risk of abuse or dependence and that treatment alone
could avert several million crimes that these individuals would otherwise commit.
Results vary by treatment modality and arrestee traits and those results are described
herein.
Keywords Crime - Substance abuse - Treatment - Synthetic data - Prevalence
This research was supported by a grant from the National Institute of Justice. Views expressed here are the
authors' and do not reflect the official position of policies of the Department of Justice, Maxarth LLC, nor
the Urban Institute, its trustees, or funders.
A. S. Bhati (E) - J. K. Roman
Maxarth LLC, 509 Cedar Spring Street, Gaithersburg, MD 20877, USA
e-mail: abhati@maxarth.com
J. K. Roman
e-mail: jroman@urban.org

4L Springer

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