Drug courts in the United States routinely fail to provide adequate, medically-sound treatment for substance use disorders, with treatment plans that are at times designed and facilitated by individuals with little to no medical training. In a report published today by Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), researchers found that drug courts - designed to reduce incarceration and provide necessary treatment - struggle to meet medical and human rights standards.

EVESHAM TWP -- Seeing the potential threat fentanyl exposure can pose to the K9s tasked with sniffing out illicit drugs, police here have equipped officers to treat dogs in the event of an overdose.

Law enforcement officials have recently come to see that the opioid crisis is affecting not only the drug's users, but also police officers who are exposed to it through their line of work and may need doses of Narcan, a drug that combats the effects of opioids.

In a guest article, the district attorney in Essex County, Massachusetts, details a local effort to offer treatment on demand to non-violent offenders rather than prosecuting them.

A bill recently introduced in the state Legislature would require police and first responders to don protective equipment before going anywhere near an overdose scene.

STOUGHTON - Just a puff from the top of an evidence bag or a hand in the wrong place can be enough to put a police officer’s life at risk.

Over the past decade, there has been growing consensus on the need for prison reform. Observers from both sides of the political divide have increasingly concluded that imprisonment in the US has been overused, costly, and ultimately, ineffective. In the wake of the Great Recession, recent reform efforts have focused on limiting the use and costs of prison. Since 2008, the nation’s imprisonment rate has dropped by more than 10 percent.

With growing public attention to the problem of mass incarceration, people want to know about women’s experience with incarceration. How many women are held in prisons, jails, and other correctional facilities in the United States? And why are they there? While these are important questions, finding those answers requires not only disentangling the country’s decentralized and overlapping criminal justice systems, but also unearthing the frustratingly hard to find and often altogether missing data on gender.

With increased attention on the criminal justice system's use of evidence-based practices, focus is needed on the quality of practice implementation and its impact on outcomes. This article defines evidence-based practices, discusses the importance of effective implementation, and outlines the drivers for organizational and operational change.

This article documents the prevalence of trauma and PTSD within this population, and discusses how correctional facilities can implement trauma-informed practices and evidence-based approaches to assist individuals with trauma histories.

1. What are judicial considerations in sentencing probation-eligible felony offenders?

2. What is “evidence-based sentencing”?

3. What is the “risk principle”?

4. What is a risk assessment instrument?

5. What is a risk and needs assessment instrument?

6. How is risk and needs assessment information used in making sentencing decisions?

7. Are risk and needs assessment scores used by the courts to make decisions about the appropriate severity of punishment?

The incarceration rate for juvenile offenders has fallen to the lowest level since the federal government began tracking it in 1997, a change brought on by a combination of falling crime rates and forward-thinking criminal justice reforms.