Reply #362: Ohio has strong drug courts [View All]

[ohio_liberal]

I work quite a bit with Common Pleas drug courts (I work for the Ohio DRC APA). Not only is there mandatory community-based drug counseling (both individual and group), but also job counseling, family counseling, working with housing concerns, medical services, regular meetings with probation officers, frequent urinalysis, community service, AA/NA meetings and so on. It seems that for the drug/alcohol abusers and small-time traffickers there's more often than not an underlying reason behind the offense such as chronic job disruption, etc. I don't want to make it sound perfect because it's not. There are always new arrests, non-compliance, and absconders. The counselers tend to not want to work around a client's job or school schedule (which pisses me off regularly). On the whole, I believe the drug courts that are able to identify and target various needs other than substance
abuse have the best successs of reducing relapse into criminal behaviors.