NIJ's Multisite Adult Drug Court Evaluation

The Adult Drug Court Research to Practice Initiative promotes the dissemination of emerging research on drug courts.

NIJ funded an unprecedented drug court evaluation called the Multisite Adult Drug Court Evaluation (MADCE).

On this page find:

Description of the Evaluation

This five-year longitudinal process, impact and cost evaluation of adult treatment drug court programs employed a hierarchical model and sampled nearly 1,800 drug court and non-drug-court persons on probation from 29 rural, suburban and urban jurisdictions across the United States.

Conceptual Framework of the Evaluation

The sample includes 23 drug courts and six comparison groups in eight states: Florida, Georgia, Illinois, New York, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, South Carolina and Washington.

A conceptual framework for this study, similar in layout to a program logic model, conveys how resources are invested or input to generate activities designed to produce program outputs.

The framework proposes that program activities collectively will result in immediate or short-term outcomes for the participants, typically measured while they are in the program. The expectation then is that program participation will result in long-term outcomes, which include changes in drug use, criminal behavior and other functions.

Research Questions

The MADCE study addresses several research questions:

Data Collection

Data from MADCE include:

Results From the Evaluation

The findings from NIJ's Multi-site Adult Drug Court Evaluation are available in the following executive summary and reports as well as in presentations at professional conferences.

Publications

Dataset