Who Gets to Recover: Examining Factors Related to the Location of Treatment Courts in the US

Treatment courts are specialty courts focused on diverting repeat drug offenders into court-mandated treatment for their substance abuse disorders. Since their inception in 1989, research on treatment courts has been focused on their efficacy in terms of recidivism and cost, which have both shown resoundingly positive results in that treatment courts both reduce recidivism among participants and are cost-effective for the court system. This thesis seeks to expand the body of treatment court research by examining where treatment courts are and the populations they typically serve. In county-level multi-variate linear OLS regressions, I have found several significant indicators linked to the location of treatment courts. There was a significant positive relationship with the percent of the population that is indigenous, percent of the population that is white, and percent of the population that is disabled. There was a significant negative relationship with the percent of the population that voted republican. In state-level multi-variate linear OLS regressions, I have found that substance abuse disorder rates are not correlated with the presence of treatment courts. These indicators begin to show which populations have been typically helped by treatment courts, which ones have been typically overlooked, and where we need to direct treatment court efforts and research in the future.