The effects of neighborhood characteristics on rearrest after participation in drug teatment court: A re-analysis of the Baltimore city drug treatment court experiment

The nexus between drug use and crime is an area of intense interest. The United States spends vast amounts of money and effort in response to drug related crime. This dissertation first elucidates the scope and nature of the drug-crime nexus, then turns to a critical discussion of the disease model of addiction, the dominant paradigm for understanding drug dependence. The data supporting viewing addiction as a context-dependent behavior and examine the treatments that arise from this conceptualization of drug use are then considered. Drug treatment courts are one form of treatment that is predicated on treating addiction as a context-dependent behavior. Drug courts have demonstrated effectiveness in reducing rearrest after participation in such treatment. The Baltimore City Drug Treatment Court (BCDTC) experiment is one of the largest randomized controlled trials of the efficacy of drug courts. Data from the BCDTC experiment were used to analyze the effects of the neighborhood in which the participants lived on later rearrest. ArcView GIS software was used to geocode the street addresses of the 206 participants to the level of their police district and census tract. Data from the US Census Bureau were used to determine census tract characteristics on ten variables previously shown to be relevant in criminological studies. The tracts were then dichotomized into “high” or “low” categories for each characteristic. The frequency of rearrest was then examined. Logistic regression analysis was used to assess the odds of rearrest and Poisson regression was used to assess the incident rate ratio of rearrest based on neighborhood characteristics. The results were generally negative, but the police district in which one resides, and a number of neighborhood characteristics were shown to have some influence on rearrest. The limitations of the analysis and directions for future study are discussed