May is National Drug Court Month, and throughout the United States, events, public service campaigns, and other activities are under way, focusing on what drug courts are and what they do. This year’s theme is “Drug Courts: A Proven Budget Solution.”
If you’re looking for general resources about drug courts, the National Institute of Justice, the Bureau of Justice Assistance, and the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention recently revised their fact sheet. If you’re interested in cost-benefit studies on drug courts, check our reference database, where a cursory search generated dozens of results. If you’ve been following CBKB for a while, you may recall that our blog focused on drug courts’ costs and benefits in September 2011, when we published these posts:
- What do cost-benefit studies tell us about drug courts?
- Calculating drug court costs: An interview with Shannon Carey
- Selected resources for conducting cost-benefit studies of drug courts
- Guest blog post: A reflection on the Multisite Adult Drug Court Evaluation
Our new guide on Calculating Justice-System Marginal Costs discusses methods used to calculate drug-court costs (page 10) and the marginal costs of drug-court hearings (pages 17, 18, and 19). One approach is a bottom-up method called transactional and institutional cost analysis (TICA). For more on TICA, see the CBKB guide, our interview with Shannon Carey, and this 2004 study she coauthored.
Have a comment or question about drug courts or other justice-related cost-benefit topics? Please post it below, follow us on Twitter or Facebook, or e-mail us at cbkb@cbkb.org.
