USM Professor Awarded Grant to Study Drug Courts

Drug courts are among the most recent innovations in the criminal justice system attempting to break the connection between substance abuse and crime. Donald Anspach, associate professor of sociology at the University of Southern Maine (USM), has recently been awarded a grant for $250,000 by the U.S. Department of Justice to assist drug courts in developing improved substance abuse treatment practices. These programs, which are court ordered and court run, attempt to reduce the use of incarceration for non-violent offenders. The grant will fund a collaborative research project, directed by Anspach, which will evaluate types of treatment services ordered by drug courts for adult offenders in four states. The project seeks to ensure better offender outcomes, specifically increased periods of abstinence from drug use and reduced re-offences and rearrests.

The two-year study will assess the degree to which offenders in drug court programs receive treatment services consistent with their needs, the relationships between treatment organizations and drug court operations, and the effectiveness, in terms of recidivism, of different types of treatment for rehabilitation.

USM will act as the lead institution, with Anspach collaborating in the study with colleagues at the University of Maryland at College Park and Correctional Counseling Inc. of Tennessee. The six investigators will be assessing variations in treatment and effectiveness at four sites: Bakersfield, California; Franklin, Louisiana; Kansas City, Missouri; and Creek County, Oklahoma. The assessment will utilize the National Institute on Drug Abuse’s 13 Principles of Effective Treatment as a model. The research will examine frequency, duration and intensity of treatment services.

Anspach’s more than twenty years of experience in criminological research has focused primarily on sentencing practices. In 1980, Anspach was the principal investigator for a National Institute of Justice study assessing the impact of parole abolition in Maine. He also has studied disparities in sentencing in Maine. Anspach has recently completed an evaluation of Maine’s first adult treatment drug court, Project Exodus, using a cost benefit analysis. He also is the principle investigator for a Center for Substance Abuse Treatment funded study to expand treatment opportunities for juveniles in Maine.