Competing values among criminal justice administrators: The importance of substance abuse treatment

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Abstract

This study applied latent class analysis (LCA) to examine heterogeneity in criminal justice administrators’ attitudes toward the importance of substance abuse treatment relative to other programs and services commonly offered in criminal justice settings. The study used data collected from wardens, probation and/or parole administrators, and other justice administrators as part of the National Criminal Justice Treatment Practices survey (NCJTP), and includes both adult criminal and juvenile justice samples. Results of the LCA suggested that administrators fell into four different latent classes: (1) those who place a high importance on substance abuse treatment relative to other programs and services, (2) those who place equal importance on substance abuse treatment and other programs and services, (3) those who value other programs and services moderately more than substance abuse treatment, and (4) those who value other programs and services much more than substance abuse treatment. Latent class membership was in turn associated with the extent to which evidence-based substance abuse treatment practices were being used in the facilities, the region of the country in which the administrator worked, and attitudes toward rehabilitating drug-using offenders. The findings have implications for future research focused on the impact that administrators’ attitudes have on service provision as well as the effectiveness of knowledge dissemination and diffusion models.

Introduction

The criminal justice system has emerged as a primary service delivery system for nearly 9 million adults and adolescents facing challenges of drug and alcohol abuse, mental illness, and other service needs in the United States (National Institute of Justice, 2003, Taxman et al., 2007a, Young et al., 2007), and many other offenders worldwide. The overwhelming needs of the population, compounded by accompanying public safety and health issues, has spurred a growing body of research focused on service delivery within the criminal and juvenile justice systems. Central to this research is an interest in characteristics of programs, services, and systems that address the goals of reducing crime and improving public health and social productivity. Increasingly, criminal justice administrators are required to stretch limited programming budgets to achieve each of these multifaceted goals. Decisions about where to allocate the scarce dollars available for service delivery are difficult for administrators to make (French et al., 2006).

One factor complicating service delivery is the scarcity of services relative to demand, a problem that is especially acute for offender populations (Belenko and Peugh, 2005, Duffee and Carlson, 1996). It is a well-known problem that the availability of treatment services in the community lags behind the need for such services (Office of Applied Studies, 2005). Current research demonstrates that the same problem is manifested in the criminal justice system in which the need for services is greater. For example, recent estimates indicate that approximately two-thirds of jail inmates were regular drug users and that more than half reported using drugs in the month prior to their incarceration (Karberg and James, 2005, Mumola, 1999 reports similar prevalence rates for prison inmates). Yet, in the United States, less than ten percent of the daily population can access substance abuse services, and the services tend to not be intensive enough for offenders’ needs (Taxman et al., 2007a)1. This same nationally representative survey of substance abuse treatment in the criminal justice system (the National Criminal Justice Treatment Practices Survey, NCJTP; Taxman et al., 2007b) demonstrated that in all segments of the correctional system – jail, prison, and probation/parole – approximately 50% offer basic drug treatment services (e.g., alcohol and drug education, substance abuse group counseling lasting 4 h or less per week, relapse prevention groups). However, the percentage of offenders that actually receive the services is much lower (Taxman et al., 2007a). Access rates are lower for individuals incarcerated in jail facilities or under community supervision as compared to prison. Young et al. (2007) report similar findings for youth in juvenile justice facilities.

Clearly, providing substance abuse services of sufficient coverage and intensity to meet offenders’ need for treatment is an expensive proposition. First, in addition to the sheer size of the population, substance abusing offenders typically present with more complex clinical issues than nonoffenders (e.g., co-occurring disorders, risk for HIV and Hepatitis C contraction), complicating conventional treatment delivery (Chandler et al., 2004, Ditton, 1999) and increasing the cost (Green et al., 2004). Second, administrators in corrections environments are responsible for ensuring that their facilities/offices offer an array of services to offenders intended to fulfill various purposes—criminal deterrence, punishment, victim restitution, and rehabilitation. To be sure, the extent to which local administrators have control over their budgets and the services their facility offers certainly varies from state to state (as well as nation to nation), with some executives exercising more control than others. In the United States, funding mechanisms for substance abuse treatment vary from state to state, with some states providing funding through the Department of Corrections and others through state public health or substance abuse agencies. Regardless of these complications, however, the bottom line is the same: the more services facilities offer, the higher their costs.

One factor that should influence which services are offered is their effectiveness in reaching the goal of improving public safety, and addressing public health concerns, as well as increasing the prospects of improving the social productivity of the offenders themselves. A recent focus on evidence-based practices (EBPs) has provided a framework for understanding how substance abuse treatment and other services may provide a means of protecting society by reducing the recidivism rates of offenders. The EBP movement in treatment identifies the services that are likely to improve the offender's prospects to live as a law-abiding citizen upon release back to the community. By contrast, in corrections EBPs are focused on identifying systems features that can maximize the results from delivery of treatment services and programs through the selection of offenders with criminogenic factors that are amenable to intervention. The more aware of EBPs, treatment interventions, and correctional system features administrators are, the more likely they are to implement them. And, as good public servants, the more likely that administrators are aware of EBPs, the more likely that they will allocate programming dollars toward their adoption and implementation (assuming that they have the control to do so; Chandler et al., 2004).

While several studies have reported that treatment staff interest in and attitudes toward treatment services, including EBPs, influence the extent to which they are adopted by treatment agencies (Fuller et al., 2007, Henggeler et al., 2007, Kirby et al., 2006, Simpson et al., 2007), the literature examining administrator attitudes is limited except for recent work by Fuller et al. (2007), Moore et al. (2004), Munoz-Plaza et al. (2006), and Willenbring et al. (2004). These studies tend to find that administrators support EBP adoption but also perceive that in order to effectively adopt EBPs, they would need to address barriers such as insufficient staff time and staff's lack of knowledge or skills in EBP use. To our knowledge, only two studies have focused on how corrections administrator attitudes are associated with the extent to which they report using EBPs. A nationally representative survey of adult corrections administrators (using data collected in the NCJTP) revealed that administrators that support offender rehabilitation are more likely to use EBPs (Friedmann et al., 2007; see also Henderson et al., 2008). A companion study of treatment directors in juvenile justice programs indicated that greater commitment by these individuals to their organizations was associated with more EBP use (Henderson et al., 2007). However, these studies did not consider the extent to which administrator attitudes influence decisions regarding which types of programs receive the greatest support.

The current study uses advanced latent variable modeling techniques (specifically latent class analysis, LCA) to examine administrators’ ratings of the importance of a variety of services relative to substance abuse treatment. Specifically, administrators were asked to rate the importance of a given service relative to substance abuse treatment on a scale of 1 (much less important) to 5 (much more important). Duffee and Carlson (1996) conceptualize such decisions as necessarily resolving competing value premises regarding substance abuse treatment services for offenders. Specifically, these authors regard “treatment on demand” as a worthwhile policy ideal, but assert that, ultimately, it does not realistically consider the resource allocation decisions that many administrators confront. Administrators are often required to resolve conflicts between value premises on two dimensions: (1) who should receive services, and (2) what services should be provided, although it is likely that most administrators will have more control over the former. These are practical dilemmas in drug abuse policy and practice. We argue that corrections administrators must implicitly resolve similar conflicts between value premises when determining which services are prioritized in their agencies.

LCA allows us to derive subtypes of administrators’ value orientations with respect to the importance of substance abuse treatment. We assumed that at least three classes of value orientations would emerge, one suggesting that all services are equally important, a second suggesting that substance abuse treatment is more important than other services, and a third suggesting that other services are more important than substance abuse treatment. However, given the limited research on administrator value orientations, we propose this as an exploratory research question.

Our second goal was to examine to what extent group membership would predict the degree to which administrators report their organization uses EBPs, and to examine correlates of group membership, specifically administrators’ attitudes toward offender rehabilitation, and facility type (adult vs. juvenile and state vs. county). We hypothesized: (1) that the facilities having administrators reporting that substance abuse treatment has high importance would be using more EBPs; (2) that administrator attitudes consistent with crime reduction through offender rehabilitation would be more likely to rate substance abuse treatment with high importance than administrators that did not (consistent with previous research, Friedmann et al., 2007); (3) that administrators of juvenile justice agencies would be more likely to rate substance abuse treatment as high importance given the underlying child-saving premise of the juvenile justice system (Nissen and Kraft, in press); and (4) that administrators working in state prisons would be more likely to rate substance abuse treatment with high importance than administrators working in jails or probation and parole facilities (consistent with previous research; Friedmann et al., 2007). Finally, we explored whether administrators’ attitudes regarding the importance of substance abuse treatment varied depending on the region of the country in which they are located and the extent to which corrections and substance abuse treatment agencies carried out joint activities focused on providing substance abuse treatment to offenders.

Section snippets

Methods

The National Criminal Justice Treatment Practices (NCJTP) survey is a multilevel survey designed to assess state and local adult and juvenile justice systems in the United States. The primary goals of the survey are to examine organizational factors that affect substance abuse treatment practices in correctional settings as well as to describe available programs and services. The NCJTP survey solicited information from diverse sources ranging from executives of state criminal justice and

Descriptive statistics

Respondents were primarily wardens of adult (67.2%) prisons (59.3%) located in the Southern United States (38.1%; Western, Northeastern, and Midwestern States 26.3%, 18.8%, and 16.7% respectively). The average value of EBP use was −0.45 (SD = 1.02), which indicates that facilities were using slightly less than half of the 15 EBPs we assessed in Henderson et al. (2008). As a group, the administrators tended to report stronger punishment (M = 4.54, SD = 0.49) than rehabilitative attitudes (M = 2.46, SD = 

Discussion

When examining administrators’ ratings of the importance of programs/services over the entire sample, it appears that with a few exceptions (e.g., community service, transitional housing, work release) approximately half of the administrators rated the programs and services as equally important as substance abuse treatment. The relative ambiguity that is expressed over the importance of substance abuse treatment is most likely due to the inherent tension involved in resolving goals related to

Role of funding source

Funding for this project was provided, through a grant, #5 U01 DA016193, from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), a division of the National Institutes of Health. NIDA had no further role in study design; in the collection, analysis and interpretation of data; in the writing of the report; or in the decision to submit the paper for publication.

Contributors

C. Henderson had the main responsibility for the conception and realization of this manuscript, including data analysis and interpretation, and has collaborated with the other author to accomplish these tasks. F. Taxman designed and conducted the parent study that provided the data for the project, wrote sections of the manuscript and collaborated with the other author in the review and revision of the complete paper at various stages. Both authors have reviewed the final document and find it

Conflict of interest

Neither author report any actual nor potential conflict of interest (financial, personal or other relationships with other people or organizations) that could inappropriately influence, or be perceived to influence, this work.

Acknowledgements

This research was supported under a cooperative agreement from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Public Health Service, National Institutes of Health, National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIH/NIDA). The authors gratefully acknowledge the collaborative contributions by federal staff from NIDA, members of the Coordinating Center (University of Maryland at College Park, Bureau of Governmental Research and George Mason University), and the nine Research Center grantees of the NIH/NIDA

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