About the Drug Court of New South Wales
Drug Courts
Drug Courts are specialist courts that deal with offenders who are dependent on drugs. They emerged as a result of growing disenchantment with the ability of traditional criminal justice approaches to provide long-term solutions to the cycle of drug use and crime. Drug Courts aim to assist drug-dependent offenders to overcome both their drug dependence and their criminal offending.
The first of the Drug Courts began operation in the United States in 1989. Drug Courts have also been trialed in the United Kingdom, Canada and several Australian jurisdictions. The experience in courts of therapeutic jurisprudence including Drug Courts in the United States has strongly influenced the roles and functions of the NSW Drug Court. (A bibliography can be found at http://www.law.arizona.edu/depts/upr-intj/)
The Drug Court of New South Wales (NSW) is the first Drug Court to be trialed and evaluated in Australia. The Court began operation as a two-year pilot in February 1999. The evaluations of the Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research were published in February 2002 and can be found at (www.lawlink.nsw.gov.au/bocsar). Following these evaluations it was decided to continue the program. The Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research further evaluated the Drug Court in 2008.
How the Drug Court operates
The conduct of the Drug Court is governed by
The Court has Local Court and District Court jurisdiction. The court operates from the Parramatta Court complex.
Objectives of the Drug Court Act
Section 3 of the Drug Court Act 1998 sets out the objectives the Drug Court seeks to achieve. These are:
- to reduce the drug dependency of eligible persons, and
- to promote the re-integration of such drug dependent persons into the community, and
- to reduce the need for such drug dependent persons to resort to criminal activity to support their drug dependencies.
This objective is to be achieved by establishing a scheme, under which drug dependent persons, who are charged with criminal offences, can be diverted into programs designed to eliminate, or at least reduce, their dependency on drugs. Reducing a person's dependency on drugs should reduce the person's need to resort to criminal activity to support that dependency, and should also increase the person's ability to function as a law abiding citizen.
The Drug Court Team
The Court works in collaboration with a number of other organisations. These include the Department of Corrective Services, including the Community Compliance Monitoring Group, and the Department of Health, through Justice Health and the Area Health Services. In addition a large number of residential rehabilitation services provide treatment for Drug Court participants. Officers of the Director of Public Prosecutions, a Police Prosecutor and the Legal Aid Commission also form part of the Drug Court team.
Part of the role of the Drug Court team is to oversight the progress of participants through the program, and jointly formulate strategies to assist participants' rehabilitation. The team consists of the DPP solicitor, the Police representative, the Clinical Nurse Consultant, the Legal Aid solicitors, the Community Compliance Monitoring Group coordinator, the Registrar of the Court and the Judge.
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