Drug Court plays a huge roll in both Psychology and law. It is clear that drug court is for those who have a sever addiction to a substance or alcohol. I wanted to know what exactly goes on during drug court, the requirements, and some statistics that follow drug court.
Drug court was put in place in 1989. This was a system to help felony drug offenders. It is community based that focuses on rehabilitation, treatment, and supervised programs. Drug Court is specifically designed for drug offenders. It is there to help them rehabilitate their lives with a goal of lowering the incarceration rates due to drug offenders. Approximately 1/3 of people in prison are drug offenders. That is a huge number when we know the number of people just in prison alone! The
The psychology part is the addiction itself. I think it is very hard for people to really understand how addiction works, especially in highly addictive drugs. The addiction is what makes a person a felony drug offender. It takes intense drug court to help rehabilitate them and have them back to normal society. The stress that goes along with drug users to trying to become clean is a big part of psychology as well. This all falls under behavioral psychology, clinical psychology, and sometimes abnormal psychology.
For the law part of
Below are some websites to help better explain drug courts and what does into them.
http://www.whitehousedrugpolicy.gov/enforce/drugcourt.html
This is a
http://www.drugwarfacts.org/cms/node/36
This is a website that is fact based, It shows a graph of incarceration rates and then
I'm very interested in Drug Court, actually. I did my social work internship this summer at the BHCJ and Dept. of Corrections. Each week I would sit in a mental health court and a drug court experiencing how the whole court system works. This short post does a good introduction into what the goal of drug court is. Sadly, my opinion though, is that it is not entirely working 100%. Many of the offender's I witnessed at drug court were on their 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th..(so on) drug crime and still serving jail time for previous sentences. I'm not sure what the "fix" is and I'm not hating on the drug court system, but especially in the CF/Waterloo area, I know that something more needs to be done to ensure that repeat-offender's learn their lesson, get help via drug treatment, or seek other options. The drug court system has good intentions and I believe will only improve as time goes on.
Ive always had in interest in the effects of drugs on society. Not from a chemical standpoint but from a institutional, moral, economic and political viewpoint. The United States has the highest incarceration rate per capita in the world and as the article mentions above, an overwhelming majority are non-violent drug offenders. The prisons in this country are privately owned entities that receive state and federal funding. More and more non-violent drug offenders are processed through the system, the prisons get crowded and then, violent criminals are let go to make room for more pot smokers.
I am 100% in favor of re-legalizing (yes it was once legal) marijuana. Marijuana is currently CANADA's largest cash crop ($20 Billion with a 'b' annually), if legalized California (on the way to becoming America's first failed state) could bring in nearly $7million per week if legalized and taxed.
Prohibition does not lead to rejection of a substance. Prohibition only leads to underground markets being created with unlawful rules, ruthless figureheads and violence (just look at Mexico, or all of Latin America for that matter.)
Portugal decriminalized personal possession of all drugs. Since then drug use for most drugs has dropped, especially in the 13-19 age range. From 2001-2005, marijuana use was the lowest in all of the E.U.
Simply put, I hate to see our prisons being jam packed full of non-violent drug offenders who obviously need rehabilitation not incarceration. You can't punish an addiction. The sooner we realize this, the sooner we can stop wasting billions of dollars on the "war on drugs" which have left drugs just as easily - if not more readily- available now as in the 70s when it was enacted.