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This article addresses the problems and opportunities of on-site cost estimation of state mandates on the law enforcement and justice system in five Arizona counties. On-site cost estimation was time consuming and costly, involving a great deal of travel with numerous return visits to conduct hundreds of interviews with county staff throughout 68 departments. Estimates are based on qualitative as well as quantitative data and thus limited to conveying a general sense of the costs of carrying out a mandate in a given year. On-site data collection also provided opportunities to gain new perspectives on the workings of the law-justice system, on state-county funding arrangements, on the need to view the law-justice system as an interrelated whole, and on the utility of considering community value along with costs of the law-justice system.

Effective substance use treatment is a viable way to reduce criminal justice contact among drug-involved offenders, but there is still a lot to learn about which indicators have the greatest impact on treatment outcomes. The purpose of this paper is to determine which clinical indicators influenced the likelihood of rearrest among male drug-involved offenders.

This prospective longitudinal study examined indicators of 12-month post-treatment rearrest for male criminal justice-involved substance use treatment patients. Multinomial logistic regression results drawn from a sample of 1,531 adult male patients who were mandated to substance use treatment indicated that there were different factors related to the likelihood of one as well as multiple post-treatment arrests.

Demographic risk factors, such as age and unemployment, were associated with significant increases in the probability of experiencing an arrest within 12-months of treatment discharge. Substance use relapse was also a significant indicator of the likelihood of rearrest and contributed to an increase in the odds of one post-treatment rearrest as well as multiple rearrests. A drug dependence diagnosis, relative to a diagnosis for alcohol dependence, was associated with an increased likelihood of rearrest. Participation in outpatient treatment was associated with a lower likelihood of rearrest.

These findings emphasize the need for treatment providers to concentrate heavily on demographic risk reduction to minimize the chance that male patients are rearrested after treatment. Relapse prevention, on the other hand, is critical in the effort to minimize the number of post-treatment rearrests in this population.

The results from this study provide evidence to empirically support the refinement of substance treatment programs for male patients involved in the criminal justice system.

This chapter provides an overview of local government auditing in Brazil. The mandate of regional Courts of Accounts, which are public audit organisations, includes overseeing states and municipalities’ legal compliance and public policy performance, while the federal Supreme Audit Institution scrutinises fiscal transfers from the central to local governments. Each of the 32 regional Courts of Accounts is autonomous. However, all follow the Napoleonic audit model and are internally organised in three main functions: auditing (comprising investigation, fair hearing and adversarial phase, and accusation), prosecuting (comprising legal compliance analysis), and judgmental. Despite the comprehensive legal mandate and recent digitalisation efforts, Courts still focus on compliance audit. Due to their autonomy, the Courts lack central coordination, standardised audit techniques, and uniform procedural rules. Moreover, the Courts’ lack of independence and transparency may impair their capacity to promote democratic accountability.

The exclusionary rule remains one of the most controversial doctrines in America’s constitutionalized criminal procedure. Jurists and commentators criticize the American exclusionary rule as a rule unique to American jurisprudence. Though American jurists and commentators’ criticism focuses on the Fourth Amendment exclusionary rule, the criticism of the American exclusionary rule with reference to practices in foreign countries serves to create and maintain the misconception that the United States is the only country that has the exclusionary rule. The belief that the exclusionary rule exists only in the United States is far from accurate. This article examines the historical development and the current status of exclusionary rules in the United States, England, France, Germany, and Italy. Attentions are especially devoted to analyzing the characteristics of the American exclusionary rule with reference to exclusionary rules in other countries.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the complex factors associated with informed consent in probation and parole settings.

The author conducted a literature review exploring informed consent in correctional settings. To identify articles for review, the author searched electronic peer-reviewed literature databases for articles on: informed consent, corrections, probation, parole, voluntariness, and coercion.

There is evidence in the literature to suggest that the informed consent process is significantly more complicated within correctional settings than in civilian contexts. The use of implicit and explicit coercion and determining an offender’s voluntariness status may be a problematic prospect unique to the setting. This manuscript makes recommendations to ensure informed consent is truly obtained and to safeguard client welfare.

There is a paucity of literature on providing mental health services in probation and parole settings. Furthermore, this paper is unique in discussing factors associated with the informed consent process in that context.

In today's global economy, the public routinely engages in international financial transactions via the internet. This has created opportunities for online fraud. The paper aims to explain what policymakers who are serious about providing crime victims with an effective restitution remedy can learn from the US Government's experience with forfeiture.

The paper, by an Assistant US Attorrney, combines narrative with argument and analysis.

Existing restitution law is ineffective. Prosecutors have used forfeiture laws as an indirect mean of providing compensation for crime victims, but forfeiture law has its limits. The better approach would be for Congress to authorize the pretrial seizure and restraint of assets directly for restitution, utilizing standards comparable to those that exist in current forfeiture law. To address situations where a defendant places money overseas to avoid restitution, Congress should enact international restitution laws comparable to those that exist in forfeiture to facilitate the recovery of those assets. Without these kinds of reforms, the government will continue to struggle to collect restitution.

The paper provides information of value to all involved with international financial transactions and law enforcement activities.

Purpose – Since the mid-20th century, drug addiction in America has increasingly been redefined as a disease and diagnosed as a widespread yet treatable disorder. The idiosyncrasies of addiction as a disease, however, have tended to block the journey of the addict from stigmatized moral failure to therapeutic reprieve. Centering in on the process of the “court-led diagnosis” of addiction, this qualitative case study uses ethnography and interviewing at a county drug court and one of its “partner” therapeutic communities to examine the process in detail, from the first negotiations between treatment and court personnel over the eligibility of the client, to the gradual inculcation of an addict identity by means of intensive cognitive education and behavioral modification.

Methodology/approach – Qualitative: ethnography and interviews.

Findings – We demonstrate that a shift from moral judgment to therapeutic sympathy is particularly unlikely for the fast-growing mass of criminal offenders whose diagnosis is spearheaded by the state in the form of the therapeutic jurisprudence of the drug court. For this group, the emphasis on the need for comprehensive resocialization and the close cooperation between the intimacies of therapeutic “rehab” and the strong arm of criminal justice “backup” not only maintains, but intensifies, moral tutelage, and stigmatization.

Social implications – The convergence of drug treatment and criminal justice tends to produce yet another stigmatizing biologization of poverty and race, lending scientific validity to new forms of criminalizing and medicalizing social hardship.

Drug Treatment Courts (DTCs) offer a form of alternative sentencing for people who have been convicted of a crime related to drug or alcohol abuse. The work of rehabilitation in DTCs is client-centered, meaning that it takes into account all of the client’s needs that affect their life in regards to completion of the program and rehabilitation. DTCs employ teams of people made up of judges, lawyers, educators, clinicians, and community supervisors. There are specific ways that librarians might become involved with DTCs regarding both literacy and, more specifically, health literacy. Existing programs could be adapted to solve common health literacy problems of participants, and librarians could also forge relationships with DTCs. Training for librarians should include education about the health and literacy problems faced by this population so they can successfully connect DTC participants with people and information that will contribute to their success completing the program and building healthier lives. This chapter looks to established best practices within DTCs and to some current related programs within public libraries to find grounds for expanding services to this population.

Purpose – This chapter considers the consequences on liberty in relationship to the development of the international problem-solving court movement.

Design/methodology/approach – The research, which relies principally on ethnographic fieldwork in six different common law countries (England, Ireland, Scotland, Australia, Canada, and the United States), explores the development of local problem-solving courts in each jurisdiction. These include drug courts, community courts, domestic violence courts, and mental health courts. The ethnographic fieldwork was supplemented with data from various other sources, including government reports, parliamentary debates, evaluations of individual court programs, publications issued by various advocacy groups, media accounts, public statements and articles by problem-solving court judges, and analyses of specialty courts in law reviews and other academic journals.

Findings – The research reveal that the five countries outside of the United States demonstrate greater concern with protecting the dignity of the court, due process, and individual rights – or what the Australians refer to as open and natural justice.

Originality/value – It is the first large-scale comparative study of problem-solving courts in the common law countries where the movement is most advanced.

This paper seeks to investigate the work performed by French Cour des comptes magistrates as part of performance audits. The research objective is to understand who the magistrates are, what they do, how they do what they do, how they perceive their role, what authority they feel they can claim, and how, through performance audits, they try to influence the way the organisations they visit are run.

In addition to 35 interviews conducted with Court magistrates (based on a semi-structured interview questionnaire) and non-participant observation, public documentation was analysed. To understand how magistrates perform their tasks at the Court, basic theories on influence processes and theories on decision making developed by Herbert A. Simon were applied.

After exploring the universe in which magistrates of the French Cour des comptes operate, it appears that their undertaking of performance audits has engendered a host of competing visions: the transition to modernity has to occur. The Court presents itself officially as a supreme audit institution but it acts as a grand corps de l ' État (senior branch of the Civil Service). Magistrates come to the Court of their own accord and make every effort to avoid being viewed as control professionals. The Court openly positions itself as a “judge of management”, wishing to impose its jurisdictional authority on activities that are essentially professional in character. A migration from traditional roles is observed: the role of the Court as a critic of the Administration has been sidelined. In addition, the magistrates claim to be judges when they are in the ambit of the Court, but shed this role for that of “catalysts of change” when they interact with representatives of the organisations audited.

The research is based on a detailed analysis of a specific context. This may limit the wider applicability of the findings. However, the data gathered from the French experience could be useful for other supreme audit institutions (SAIs) whose status is equivalent to that of the Court, or whose mandate has expanded in the past decade.

This study lifts the veil on the performance audit practice at one of the numerous supreme audit institutions. In addition, the French context has received scant attention from researchers.