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2 Criminology & Pub. Pol'y 197 (2002-2003)
The Impact of Drug Courts

handle is hein.journals/crpp2 and id is 205 raw text is: REACTION ESSAY THE IMPACT OF DRUG COURTS JOHN S. GOLDKAMP Temple University The nationwide drug court movement was inadvertently launched by local Miami justice officials in 1989 as they sought to devise reasonable alternative strategies for dealing with the enormous caseloads, backlogs in the courts, and institutional crowding generated by the drug epidemic of the 1980s and the law enforcement policies of the War on Drugs. Although the genesis of the treatment-oriented methodology of the nation's first drug court is of interest for many reasons discussed elsewhere,' Miami officials concocted an innovation that challenged the conventional wisdom of the time regarding the handling of drug offenders. With evidence of the failure of traditional methods powerfully before them in the form of overcrowded courts, jails, and prisons, and rapidly recycled arrests, the Miami officials improvised the drug court response to tackle what they assumed to be the drug-crime nexus behind the system dysfunction. It is easy in retrospect to overlook how dramatic a departure from prevailing judicial philosophy Miami's drug court represented in 1989. At the request of Presiding Judge Gerald Wetherington in Miami's Eleventh Judicial Circuit, Judge Herbert Klein proposed a strategy for dealing with the overwhelmingly large numbers of drug offenders entering the court system. Judge Klein's recommendation was simple: We could try to help them. In the larger national court community, Judge Klein's endorsement of treatment as a court strategy, his advocacy of what was received as-how awkward-rehabilitation, was met with an uncomfortable silence. Many judges believed that rehabilitation had long ago been discredited (Allen, 1981; Martinson, 1974) and regarded adopting such a philosophy as the primary orientation for court intervention in the drug problem as idealistic and impractical. Probably more judges believed that such court-based treatment intervention was inappropriate because it appeared to conflict with the judiciary's mission to serve as neutral arbiter. Further, the helping aim of the drug court struck many judges as asking the judge to be a social worker, in essence calling for an activist, advocacy role that many judges believed would undermine the professional detachment needed for resolving criminal cases fairly. 1. See, e.g., Nolan (2002), Goldkamp (2000), and Hora et al. (1999). NUMBER 2 2003 VOLUME 2 PP 197-206

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