Skip to start of content

Conference papers

Evaluating Australia's first drug court : research challenges

Karen Freeman
Senior Research Officer, NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research

Presented at:
Evaluation in Crime and Justice : Trends and Methods
ABS House, Canberra
24-25 March 2003

Abstract

The development of illicit-drug policy has frequently been undertaken with little regard to research and evaluation. However, when the New South Wales Government committed to piloting the first Australian drug court in 1998, it took the unusual step of integrating evaluation into the planning stages of the project. As the evaluators of the project, the New South Wales Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research were given the rare opportunity of engaging policy makers, the judiciary, government and non-government service-delivery agencies in the evaluation process. The evaluation that resulted was arguably one of the most rigorous drug court evaluations yet conducted, comprising four components: monitoring, cost-effectiveness, health and well-being, and a process evaluation. This paper describes the evaluation processes undertaken and explores the methodological and operational challenges faced by the evaluators and how these challenges were managed.