Drug Testing in Criminal Justice Settings

Criminal justice agencies, and especially agencies supervising offenders not behind bars, increasingly use drug testing as a means of offender monitoring and control. The frequent use of drugs such as cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine, and alcohol has been linked to crime via either expense or intoxication. drug testing can provide relatively inexpensive and highly reliable information about an aspect of offender behavior strongly linked to recidivism and other important outcomes. Combined with voluntary or mandated drug treatment, it can both increase compliance and serve as a diagnostic “early warning” of relapse. Combined with sanctions, especially if the sanctions are immediate and virtually automatic, testing alone, without formal treatment, can significantly reduce drug-taking, thus saving money and conserving treatment resources for those most in need of them. It has been claimed that a comprehensive testing-andsanctions program applied to all probationers and parolees with heroin or cocaine problems, and providing treatment to those need it, could shrink the total markets for heroin and cocaine by 40% at a total cost (not allowing for any offsets from reduced imprisonment) of approximately $5 billion per year nationally (Kleiman 1997). If such a result were achievable in practice, testing and sanctions would represent a more cost-effective strategy for combating substance abuse and illicit markets than the current reliance on law enforcement efforts aimed at drug distributors and sellers. The potential of testing programs is limited by legal-procedural issues – in particular the division of authority between community corrections agencies and the courts – and by the managerial and budgetary limitations of the community-corrections agencies themselves.