Is Treatment Readiness Associated With Substance Use Treatment Engagement? An Exploratory Study.

With nearly 8.2% of Americans experiencing substance use disorders (SUDs), a need exists for effective SUD treatment and for strategies to assist treatment participants to complete treatment programs (Chandler, Fletcher, & Volkow, 2009). The purpose of the current research is to contribute to an emerging knowledge base about treatment readiness and its utility for predicting substance use treatment process performance measures.

Does substance misuse moderate the relationship between criminal thinking and recidivism?

Purpose: Some differential intervention frameworks contend that substance use is less robustly related to recidivism outcomes than other criminogenic needs such as criminal thinking. The current study tested the hypothesis that substance use disorder severity moderates the relationship between criminal thinking and recidivism.

Methods: The study utilized two independent criminal justice samples.

Short-term trajectories of substance use in a sample of drug-involved probationers.

The current study estimates trajectories of illegal substance use in a sample of 251 drug-involved probationers to identify risk profiles that predict group membership and explores the impact of treatment participation across these trajectories. Trajectory analyses reveal five patterns of drug use during probation supervision. Age and the use of hard drugs are identified as the strongest predictors of involvement in illicit drug use while on probation.

Co-occurring disorders in treatment-based courts: results of a national survey.

Drug courts and mental health courts have expanded rapidly in the past several decades to provide more efficient coordination of treatment and supervision of offenders with behavioral health problems. A significant number of offenders in these court-based programs have co-occurring mental and substance use disorders, which predict early termination, relapse, rearrest, and other negative outcomes. A web-based national survey examined programmatic adaptations for co-occurring disorders (CODs) among 54 drug courts, mental health courts, and freestanding COD dockets.

A reanalysis of the self-appraisal questionnaire: psychometric properties and predictive validity.

This research reassessed the psychometric properties and predictive validity of the Self-Appraisal Questionnaire (SAQ) in response to published criticism of the authors' earlier work. The current research used a much longer recidivism tracking-period, a different measure of recidivism, a larger sample, and more advanced analytic techniques than the original. Examination of the SAQ's psychometric properties continued to indicate that three of the six recidivism prediction subscales exhibited substandard levels of reliability and four of these subscales were not unidimensional.