A Decade of Experience: Why Real Justice Reform Requires Practitioners

By: Judge Brian MacKenzie (Ret.), David Wallace, Mack Jenkins, and Cynthia Herriott – Justice Speakers Institute, Inc.

As leaders of the Justice Speakers Institute, we have each served as practitioners in a treatment court. Judge Brian MacKenzie (Ret.) presided over one of Michigan’s treatment courts. David Wallace, as Chief Assistant Prosecuting Attorney for Huron County, has represented the people in his county’s treatment court.  Mack Jenkins, as Chief Probation Officer for San Diego County, oversaw the integration of probation and treatment services that made recovery achievable in his county’s treatment court.  Cynthia Herriott, a law enforcement veteran and former Rochester Police Chief, worked as a police liaison to the treatment court. Collectively, our experiences have shown us what decades of research now confirm, that treatment courts work and that their success is grounded, not in ideology, but in measurable, human outcomes.

For more than three decades, treatment courts have quietly transformed how justice is done in America. The results speak for themselves, as one national study puts it, “Decades of evidence show that drug courts have a positive effect on recidivism.”^[1] A recent review by the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that eight cost-benefit analyses reported savings of up to $47,852 per participant.^[2]  Taken together, this evidence demonstrates that when courts combine accountability with treatment, public safety improves, costs decline, and lives are rebuilt.

As leaders of the Justice Speakers Institute, we’ve seen these results firsthand. Together, we’ve trained judges, probation officers, prosecutors, defense counsel, and treatment professionals around the world. In doing so, we have witnessed how treatment courts operate across the United States, and witnessed a justice model that is evidence-based, data-driven, and grounded in both accountability and recovery.

And yet, despite this track record, much of the national conversation tries to paint a different picture. To read non-practitioner commentary, you might think treatment courts are a failed experiment. From one side, critics accuse them of being coercive and punitive. From the other, they’re condemned as permissive and soft on crime.  But the ideological critics see it differently.

The View from the Sidelines

The fiercest critics of treatment courts share one trait: they’ve never worked in one.

On the progressive or academic left, scholars such as Kerwin Kaye, Evelyn Lia Malavé, and Rebecca Tiger, view treatment courts as extensions of the carceral state; systems that disguise punishment as therapy. Their argument is built around theory, not practice. Courts, they claim, force participants into scripted narratives of substance dependency and redemption that serve the state’s interest in control rather than the individual’s need for autonomy.

These critiques are based in academic sociology, which relies on field observation and selective interviews, not operational experience. Few of these writers have ever managed a docket, reviewed a pre-court staffing report, or struggled to find a residential bed for a participant detoxing without insurance. The practical realities, the impossible budgets, the shortages of clinicians, the human chaos of relapse and recovery, are missing from their analysis.

On the conservative right, the attack sounds different but comes from the same distance. Commentators like Heather Mac Donald and Charles Fain Lehmad and David Muhlhausen describe treatment courts as soft justice, programs that replace punishment with social work. Drawing on two-decade-old statistics, they claim that drug courts barely outperform probation and waste taxpayer money. But they, like their progressive counterparts, have never served as a judge, probation officer, or treatment provider. Their arguments appear to rest on one particular philosophy: that the court’s duty is to punish, not to rehabilitate.

The result is an odd symmetry. Both sides either minimize or outright reject the recidivism data that demonstrate treatment courts work.  Claiming moral clarity, both use the same small pool of dated data, and neither has firsthand experience in how these courts function day to day.

Ideology vs. Experience

The left and right critiques start from opposing moral premises but end up making the same mistake, they replace evidence with opinion.

Progressive academics see treatment courts as too punitive. Conservatives see them as too permissive. Practitioners know they’re both wrong. The best courts are neither. They are structured accountability programs that link justice supervision with behavioral health care, built on decades of research showing that treatment, sanctions, and incentives, applied together, reduce recidivism and save lives.

When critics on either end talk about “coercion,” they often ignore how choice actually operates in courtrooms. Participants typically have a choice about entering a treatment court program as an alternative to jail. They sign contracts, receive due process, and work with multidisciplinary teams that review progress weekly. No one in the field pretends the system is perfect, access to medication, transportation, and housing remain major obstacles, but the caricature of treatment courts as authoritarian or indulgent simply doesn’t reflect actuality.

The Real Evidence

Empirical research tells a quieter, more reality-based story than the ideologues do.

• National research findings are supported by studies showing that drug court participants have significantly lower re-arrest rates compared to non-participants, with the difference sometimes as high as 50–85% in the best-performing courts.^[3]
• For every $1 invested in drug courts yields between $2 to $4 in direct taxpayer savings, with broader social benefits sometimes reaching $27 per dollar spent.^[4]
• Follow-up evaluations demonstrate that participant outcomes improve when courts adhere to best-practice standards, timely assessment, evidence-based treatment, judicial interaction, and data tracking.^[5]

Those aren’t theoretical constructs; they’re measurable results. The reason outcomes vary isn’t ideology, it’s fidelity to the treatment court model. Courts that drift away from evidence-based practices lose effectiveness; courts that stay disciplined work. That’s not politics; it’s operational reality.

What Practitioners See

Talk to any judge running a treatment court and the story you’ll hear is pragmatic, not ideological. They’ll tell you about participants on their fifth sanction but still shows up because this is the first time anyone’s believed in them. They’ll tell you about the probation officer who drives a client to detox at 2 a.m., or the coordinator who finds a last-minute housing slot to keep someone from losing custody.

Practitioners aren’t debating Kerwin Kaye or Heather Mac Donald; they’re balancing caseloads, budgets, and human crises. They operate in the messy space between compassion and accountability, where relapse isn’t a moral failure but a clinical event, and where jail can be both sanction and safety.

That balance is what both ideological camps overlook. The left reduces treatment courts to systems of control. The right dismisses them as leniency. But inside the courtroom, justice and treatment aren’t opposites, they’re interdependent.

Listening to the People Who Know

The loudest voices in this debate aren’t the people doing the work. Academic theorists and political commentators have shaped the public perception of treatment courts far more than the judges and teams who actually run them. That imbalance matters. When policy follows ideology instead of evidence, innovation suffers.

If critics truly want to understand treatment courts, they should work in one. They’ll see that while the system isn’t perfect, it’s real: human, evolving, and far more effective than the sound bites suggest.

Justice in Practice

Treatment courts were never designed to satisfy ideological purity tests. They were built to solve problems the traditional court system couldn’t, substance dependency, mental illness, and the revolving door of arrest and relapse.

As criminal justice professionals, we believe real justice reform has never belonged to one ideology or another, it belongs to those who do the work. The judges, probation officers, treatment providers, and law enforcement professionals who guide people toward recovery understand that accountability and compassion are not opposites but partners in public safety. As treatment courts continue to evolve, the conversation must remain grounded in evidence, not rhetoric, and led by those who see the results every day. We believe it’s time to let the practitioners who follow the data define what justice looks like in practice, and what its future should be.

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^[1] A second chance at life’: broadening views of success in drug courts

^[2] Strengthening the Foundation: A Look at Past, Present, and Future Research for Adult Drug Courts

^[3] Drug Courts: The Good, The Bad, and the Misunderstood

^[4] National Drug Court Statistics: Trends, Outcomes, & Challenges

^[5] Best Practices in Treatment Court Evaluation