Exploring the Impact of Technical Violations on Probation Revocations in the Context of Drug Court

One popular sanctioning model is the Hawaii Opportunity Probation with Enforcement (HOPE) community-supervision strategy. The HOPE model is primarily focused on intensive monitoring and swift and certain sanctions for every violation (Hawken and Kleiman 2009). The initial evaluation of HOPE found that more than half of probationers in the program never violated program rules and participation reduced drug use, recidivism, and subsequent incarceration (Hawken and Kleiman 2009). Although HOPE was found to be an effective program in Hawaii, subsequent evaluations of courts following similar sanctioning models provide mixed results (Hamilton et al. 2016; O’Connell et al. 2016). Although prior research has investigated the impact of sanctioning mechanisms on drug court outcomes, little attention has been given to how technical violations predict the use of jail sanctions during program participation. More research is needed to investigate the relationship between technical violations and the use of jail sanctions during court participation.