Drug Court Policy in the United States

History of Drug Policy in the US

Drug use and abuse are not new problems in the United States. Substance use dates back to Colonial America where there was an abundance of alcohol in every household. People who suffered from addiction were seen as having a “moral defect” by choosing to become addicted to substances. Modern day polices began taking form in the 1960s as Americans were concerned with the increase in psychedelic drugs and the increased use of heroin amount veterans of the Vietnam war (Brown Jr., 1981).

In 1971, President Richard Nixon declared a “war on drugs” due today the increasing national concern for drug use. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s there was a growing threat of crack cocaine in the United States. Cocaine was being smuggled into the United states at much high rates which lead to more accessibility (Sevigny, Pollack, & Reuter, 2013).

Nixon’s concept of a war on drugs, along with the concept of “Just say NO!” (Belenko,1998), drastically increased the number of people arrested for drug related crimes and the number continued to grow into the 1980s. The Federal Bureau of Investigations estimated that 580,900 people were arrested for drug related crimes in 1980. In 1989, the number of drug related arrests grew to 1.362 million (Franco, 2010).

The increase in arrests caused an increase of the number of dockets courts had to process. There were a large number of drug reoffenders who cycled in and out of the system. The rise in arrests led to a rise in incarceration. In 1980, there were 19,000 people incarcerated in state facilities from drug offenses. By 1989, the number increased to 120,100 (Franco, 2010).

With the increase in court dockets and the overcrowding of prisons came the notion of rehabilitation over incarceration. Courts, jails and prison were being overrun by nonviolent drug offenders and re-offenders. As of 1991, one in four inmates were incarcerated for drug related offenses. From the realization that the criminal...