General Practice or Evidence-Based? Exploring Drug Testing for People without a Substance Use Disorder
The criminal justice system is enthralled with drug testing, a courtship that began about forty years ago. Once a relatively rare practice, drug testing is now ubiquitous within the criminal justice system (Travis and Stacey 2010). Drug testing has been incorporated at every level of the criminal justice system—from people on pretrial release who are still presumed innocent, to post-adjudication supervision including probation and parole. In addition to traditional supervision, drug courts have elevated drug testing to one of the “ten key components” of an effective drug court, and swift, certain, and fair supervision (SCF)—fueled by the Hawaii Opportunity Probation with Enforcement, or HOPE, model—has centered drug testing as a common practice for probation departments. With few exceptions, judges and probation chiefs across the country have enthusiastically embraced the belief that if we drug test everyone on supervision the community is safer and that anything short of drug testing everyone is throwing caution to the wind.
But there is a growing challenge to conventional wisdom. Probation departments such as San Diego, Santa Cruz, the Idaho Department of Corrections, Minneapolis, and Texas’s Harris County and Brazoria County are contesting the status quo—raising the flag on blanket drug testing policies and reducing, or in some cases eliminating, drug testing for people without a substance use disorder. Albeit significant, these jurisdictions remain a minority; there are many more that continue to enforce standard drug testing policies even in the face of growing evidence they may cause more harm than good.
Drug Screenings in Practice: Narratives from People on Parole and Probation
Drug testing may act to reduce drug use and force abstinence as well as reduce criminal activity when combined with other aspects of community supervision. For example, the Hawaii Opportunity Probation with Enforcement (HOPE) Intervention found that swift and graduated sanctions were a promising mechanism for reducing subsequent drug use and criminal activity in combination with a drug testing regimen (Hawken and Kleiman 2007; Kleiman et al. 2014). Importantly, however, more recent scholarship has been unable to replicate this finding when tested in four additional settings, suggesting that HOPE recidivism arrest outcomes were quite similar to probation as usual persons under supervision and that overall cost savings may not occur due to warrant fees, drug testing, and arrests (Lattimore et al. 2016). A 2024 meta review of twenty-four separate evaluations of community-supervision modeled on HOPE and swift, certain, and fair sanctions (SCF) based upon HOPE’s core principles, found a very modest reduction in recidivism with null or weak findings amongst program features (Pattavina et al. 2024). Pattavina et al. (2024) suggest that the evaluated supervision programs may be more impactful if combined with treatment services.
The Utility of Drug Testing for Probation Risk Classification
online.ucpress.edu/fsr/article/36/4/218/200612/The-Utility-of-Drug-Testing-for-Probation-Risk
Drug Testing and Community Supervision
Today, drug testing during probation is often aligned with a “swift and certain” sanctions philosophy, whereby frequent testing and predictable consequences enforce the goal of curtailing drug use (Kleiman et al. 2003). However, drug testing in the criminal legal system has evolved over time. One of drug testing’s first applications was in the mid-1960s, coinciding with the War on Drugs, when it was implemented to identify heroin users in need of treatment and to track their progress. Findings suggested that testing contributed to lower rates of criminal activity (McGlothlin et al. 1977). The idea that drug testing could curb crime led to federally funded initiatives for drug users in the criminal legal system that expanded in the late 1970s and early 1980s alongside advancements in testing methodologies (BJA 1988; Lozito 1981). From there, evidence linking drug use and crime mounted, leading to a renewed war on drugs by law enforcement agencies (and a significant increase in the number of drug arrests; BJS 1989) in tandem with widescale implementation of testing by probation agencies (Henry and Clark 1999). In the 2000s, programs such as Hawaii’s Opportunity Probation with Enforcement (HOPE) pioneered the “swift and certain sanctions” approaches that informed people on probation of immediate and predictable consequences for positive drug tests that included short periods of jail incarceration (NIJ 2012). These shifts in responses to drug-related issues continue to influence probation policy and procedures today.
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Despite the widespread use of drug testing in probation, there is a dearth of research on its effectiveness in reducing recidivism or improving behavioral health, and a lack of recent guidelines on the practice. On one hand, some evidence suggests that testing for drug use violations in the context of swift and certain sanctions reduces positive drug tests and criminal behaviors (Grommon et al. 2013; Harrell and Roman 2001; Hawken and Kleiman 2009; Snell 2007). On the other hand, rigorous experimental studies have yielded little evidence that random drug testing with swift and certain sanctions reduces arrests, revocations, or convictions (Lattimore et al. 2016; O’Connell et al. 2016). The cost effectiveness of drug testing on probation is also yet to be determined.
