In recent years, justice reformers have called for increasing alternatives to incarceration, including drug treatment programs. But program administrators regularly tout only the low recidivism among people who successfully complete the program, ignoring the other half of people who enter diversion, who are marked “noncompliant” and exit early, often moving directly to court to be sentenced on a felony count, writes sociologist Mary Ellen Stitt, in “Adjudication Under Cover: Compliance and Inequality in the Criminal Courts,” a new article from the American Journal of Sociology. “As more and more people are diverted into therapeutic programs from the criminal courts, their cases are being adjudicated in largely hidden sites, where compliance – not law or evidence – is the basis for judgment,” she writes, in a piece that examines how the state governs mental illness and substance abuse, as does her forthcoming University of Chicago Press book, Trial by Treatment: Punishing Illness in an Age of Criminal Legal Reform.
To document the unexpected impacts of treatment-based alternatives to criminal punishment, Stitt – an assistant professor in the School of Criminal Justice in the Rockefeller College of Public Affairs & Policy and a faculty affiliate in the Department of Sociology at the University at Albany, SUNY – used court data and followed diversion participants through ethnographic fieldwork and interviews in a Southern city with high incarceration rates. At the field site that Stitt studied, strict enforcement led to a case closure/noncompletion rate of 55% of diverted defendants. Nearly one in three of those returning defendants proceeds directly to sentencing on felony convictions, because they have been required to enter guilty pleas as a condition of their entry into the diversion program, she found.
Policymakers and practitioners expanded therapeutic programs to move away from traditional punishment, typically incarceration. At this point, Stitt writes, “the programs have expanded to such a degree that a criminal legal mandate has become the most common form of referral into publicly funded drug-treatment programs.” One of the most common programs is prosecutor-led pretrial diversion, which offers arrestees the opportunity to exit the court system without a criminal conviction. Defendants are referred to programs that require them to find transportation to appear for regular therapeutic appointments, pass drug tests, and pay program fees. For those who complete the program, prosecutors drop the charges. Yet national data shows that about half of participants are ultimately ejected from their assigned programs and sent back to the legal system.
Stitt found that 70% of diversion participants assessed as having the highest need for treatment were removed from the program she followed, compared to 57% of those in the middle tier and only 40% of those assessed as “lowest need.” More than two-thirds of Black participants returned, compared with 45% of white participants. Because the highest-diversion track requires a guilty plea prior to program entry, the “noncompliant” defendants receive automatic felony convictions and proceed directly to sentencing. The resulting narrative: “the state offered poor people help to improve their lives, and they rejected it.” Stitt, through her interviews, finds otherwise, as she describes the practical-financial barriers of courts-involved people who are often unemployed or on disability, coupled with lack of trust, trauma, and mental-health struggles that can make treatment through the courts an insurmountable challenge for the most vulnerable defendants who enter the legal system.
Comments