An Evaluation of Federal Support Court in Connecticut

Other Noteworthy Substance Abuse Reentry Programs
Initial evaluations of the Hawaii Opportunity Probation with Enforcement (HOPE) program found success in reducing drug use and recidivism (Hawken & Kleiman, 2009). This initiative was a community supervision strategy for substance-abusing probationers featuring mandatory drug tests combined with swift and certain sanctions. The HOPE program was deemed effective, showing statistically significant reductions in missed probation appointments, positive urine tests for illicit substances, new arrests, probation revocations, and prison-days sentenced for HOPE probationer’s relative to control probationers. Due to HOPE’s initial success, Oleson (2016) reported at least 160 HOPE-like replications have taken place within the U.S., and the concept is spreading internationally. A recent quasi-experimental study examining a Project Hope-like implementation in Washington also found the strategy to be effective (Hamilton et al., 2016). However, two recent randomized controlled experiments, conducted by O’Connell et al. (2016) in Delaware and Lattimore et al. (2016) in four U.S. communities across the country, did not find evidence in support of HOPE’s effectiveness. Thus, the empirical findings on the effectiveness of HOPE-like programs are mixed.