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WHY ARE PEO PLE SU D D E NLY TALK IN G ABOUT D RUG COU RTS?

TO S TA RT WIT H , know very clearly what works and
what doesn’t.
T H E Y ’ RE S PRI NG I NG U P At the heart of the drug court in
Victoria is the Drug Treatment Order
E V ERY W H ER E . (DTO), a sentencing order under the
Sentencing Act 1991. DTOs are
The first one was started in Miami in exquisitely simple. They are a
1989 by judges who understood that the combination of the coercive force of
traditional criminal justice system was the criminal law: you do what we say or
not working when it came to people with you go to jail – it doesn’t get more
intractable drug problems who couldn’t coercive than that – with the
break free of their addictions or escape therapeutic component: the best ad-
the revolving door of the prison sys- diction treatments the community can
tem. Today there are 3,400 drug courts offer.
in the USA and in twenty other coun- The Sentencing Act ensures that
tries as well. There’s at least one drug the drug court works with the
court in most Australian States. NSW magistrates’ court’s most serious
has three, as does Tasmania. There’s one offenders by stipulating that if the
in Victoria at Dandenong and the Vic- crimes committed by people
torian Government has just approved a seeking access to the drug
new drug court for the Melbourne CBD court aren’t serious enough
which will be twice the size of the Dan- to attract an immediate
denong court. term of jail, the person isn’t
Drug courts work. International- eligible to enter the drug
ly they are evaluated against two stan- court program.
dards: improving the life of the defen- So people sentenced
dant and reducing the burden of crime to a DTO would,
on the community. And that’s exactly but for the
what they do to a far greater extent than DTO,
traditional justice responses to drug use otherwise
and related crime. be in jail.
A settled body of best practice de-
veloped in the US, called The Key Com-
ponents which are underpinned by
decades of research, guides the opera-

Drug Courts

B Y T ONY PARSONS
MA GISTRATE

I LLU S TR ATI O N : E TH A N Q UAG LI OT TO
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