by Hon. Ben W. Joseph


Treatment Prevents Crime – The Rapid Referral Program


The Vermont Center for Justice Research


has recently released a report entitled, Rapid Referral Program, Spectrum Youth & Family Services: Control Group Evaluation.1 The Report shows that pre-trial substance abuse treatment of defendants charged with drug-related offenses has prevent- ed the commission of more crimes in Chit- tenden County, Vermont. Under Vermont’s bail laws, a judge presiding during a defen- dant’s arraignment on criminal charges can impose conditions of release (also known as pre-trial conditions) that require the defen- dant to undergo treatment for substance abuse.2


Starting in early 2009, judges in the Chittenden County Superior Court, Crimi- nal Division, who were presiding at arraign- ments, began imposing a pre-trial condi- tion that required some defendants in al- cohol- and drug-related cases to undergo an assessment by a licensed and/or certi- fied drug and alcohol counselor. The pur- pose of the assessment was to determine if the defendant should be ordered to en- gage in substance abuse treatment while his/her criminal case was pending. The


court order for a pre-trial assessment re- quired that all information disclosed by the defendant during the assessment be held in confidence and that only the counselor’s recommendation concerning treatment be forwarded to the court. The arraignment judge then decided whether or not to ac- cept the recommendation. (Not all the as- sessments recommended treatment.) There were not enough treatment resources avail- able to order assessments in all alcohol- and drug-related cases. This process came to be known as the Rapid Referral Program and was described in detail in an article published by the Ver- mont Bar Association Journal in its 2011 winter edition.3


When that article was writ-


ten, a relatively small number of defendants had completed treatment, but the first re- ports of new offenses committed by pro- gram participants indicated that there was a much lower recidivism rate among the de- fendants who had completed treatment as compared to the recidivism rate for untreat- ed defendants. Now as a result of the rapid referral process, hundreds of defendants in


Chittenden County have gone through pre- trial treatment—most of them with coun- selors working for two local social service agencies: Spectrum Youth & Family Servic- es (defendants between sixteen and twen- ty-three years of age) and the Howard Cen- ter (defendants twenty-three years of age and older).4


The evaluation report goes to


great lengths to show that the Spectrum- treated defendants—the so-called study group—had demographic characteristics and criminal histories that were almost identical with the demographic and crimi- nal profiles of the untreated defendants in the control group. The only significant dif- ference between the characteristics of the two groups was that the study group de- fendants had been subject to pre-trial drug treatment. This supports the report’s con- clusion that treatment was the reason for the lower recidivism rate in the study group. Most of the defendants who were or-


dered into treatment at Spectrum were placed in an out-patient program that re- quired them to attend a minimum of six weekly counseling sessions with a licensed


16


THE VERMONT BAR JOURNAL • WINTER 2013


www.vtbar.org


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