The National Drug Court Institute (NDCI) was funded in 1999, with a mandate from General Barry McCaffrey, Director of the Office of Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) to provide academic quality information, education, and research to the drug court field. The first year ‘s funding included extra funds that we had no reason to believe would be repeated in the future. With that unexpected funding source, we planned a series of publications that we believed would jump-start progress in important areas where the field appeared to be lagging. To that end, our first year of publications was prepared with extraordinary effort and focus. A series of monographs were planned on cutting edge issues of the day and focus groups were held on each issue to distill the best that the field had to offer on the relevant issues. At one point, that year, we published a monograph once a month. Successful topics in the monograph series included DUI Courts, Confidetiality, Drug Court Systems, and REentry Drug Courts.. The best, in my opinion was the reentry drug court monograph. The monograph was somewhat difficult to write as it described both jail and prison based reentry courts. Jail-based reentry courts that would keep offenders local in jail environments and out of prison altogether. And prison-based reentry court that focused on dealing with the offender when he or she left prison.
We held two, two day focus groups on each model in April and May of 1999 and created power point presentations out of the material from each focus group. The presentation on the jail-based reentry court is included with the monograph. I hope to locate the prison-based presentation and include it as well.
