Estimating the Differential Costs of Criminal Activity for Juvenile Drug Court Participants: Challenges and Recommendations

Abstract

Juvenile drug court (JDC) programs have expanded rapidly over the past 20 years and are an increasingly popular option for rehabilitating juvenile offenders with substance use problems. Given the high cost of crime to society, an important economic question is whether and to what extent JDC programs reduce criminal activity among juvenile offenders. To address this question, the present study added an economic cost analysis to an ongoing randomized trial of JDC conducted in Charleston, South Carolina. Four treatment conditions were included in the parent study: Family Court with usual community-based treatment (FC, the comparison group), Drug Court with usual community-based treatment (DC), DC with Multisystemic Therapy (DC/MST), and DC/MST enhanced with Contingency Management (DC/MST/CM). The economic study estimated the cost of criminal activity for nine specific crimes at baseline (pretreatment) and 4 and 12 months thereafter. A number of methodological challenges were encountered, suggesting that it may be more difficult to economically quantify frequency and type of criminal activity for adolescents than for adults. The present paper addresses methodological approaches and challenges, and proposes guidelines for future economic evaluations of adolescent substance abuse and crime prevention programs.

Are Non-Pharmacological Interventions Effective in Reducing Drug Use and Criminality? A Systematic and Meta-Analytical Review with an Economic Appraisal of These Interventions

“…The other four studies (producing five publications) were conducted in Sweden [40], China [41], Spain [42,43], and Australia [44]. Six trials did not specify the sample gender [15,40,45,46,47,48], six trials contained female only samples [34,35,44,49,50,51,52], nine trials (and 13 publications) contained only male adult offenders [53,54,55,56,57,58,59,60,61,62,63,64,65]; and 22 trials (and 25 publications) contained male and female adult offenders [13,16,41,44,66,67,68,69,70,71,72,73,74,75,76,77,78,79,80,81,82,83,84,85,86,87,88,89,90]. Eight comparisons considered young and/or juvenile offenders [16,49,56,57,66,…”

“…In the remaining eight studies, five were rated at low risk of bias [50,52,78,83,91] and three were rated at high risk of bias [60,69,84]. …”

“…Two studies were rated at low risk of bias [65,83] and the remaining 12 studies were rated at high risk of bias [16,48,50,60,69,73,75,76,78,84,92]. …”

A Systematic Review of Literature Relating to Problem-Solving Youth Courts

“…Many studies had follow-up periods of up to 12 months (Byrnes & Parsons, 1999;Carswell, 2004;Eardley et al, 2004;Halliday-Boykins et al, 2010;Henggeler et al, 2006;McCollister et al, 2007;Mooney, unpublished;O'Connell et al, 1999;Ruiz et al, 2009;Shaw & Robinson, 1998;Weisz et al, 2002;Whiteacre, 2004). One study reported on a juvenile drug court in its first 14 months of operation (Applegate & Santana, 2000), while another considered data across 18 months (Eardley et al, 2004).…”

Recent Achievements in Alcohol and Drug Abuse Health Services Research

“…The article by McCollister et al 3 is an innovative look at the cost of criminal activity following a clinical trial examining multisystemic therapy (MST) and juvenile drug court compared to family court with usual community-based treatment. The authors present a careful description of their approach to estimating costs for juvenile crimes, noting that unit cost estimates have to be taken from adult crimes.…”