Drug abuse treatment in the context of correctional surveillance

Evaluating drug abuse treatment within a correctional framework presents unique issues and challenges. Given their respective emphases on rehabilitation and incapacitation, treatment and corrections approaches to incarcerated drug abusers often differ in methods aimed at reducing deviant behavior. Although this results in problems in planning integrative drug abuse intervention strategies, the two approaches are not always incompatible. Corrections can help identify those individuals in need of treatment, and for some of these, treatment can lessen the need for incapacitation. Understandably, gaining a drug-abusing offender's cooperation in monitoring routines and engendering trust in the confidentiality of treatment conducted in criminal justice systems settings, while still ensuring public safety, are not easy tasks. Nevertheless, there are decided advantages, in terms of compliance and retention, to the increased surveillance exercised by the criminal justice system in community-based treatment efforts. In these efforts, therapy coupled with urine monitoring appears particularly promising. Along with the presentation of descriptive and preliminary outcome information, this report provides a discussion of treatment/corrections issues within the framework of an ongoing treatment evaluation study involving drug-abusing parolees in Baltimore City.