Abstract
The nascence of drug courts—a phenomenon that predominates judicial efforts to break the cycle of drug abuse in the United States—has been attributed to Judge Herbert M. Klein, then chief judge of Florida’s 11th judicial circuit. Fearing the loss of federal funding that might accompany noncompliance with a federal mandate to reduce inmate populations, the Supreme Court of Florida directed Judge Klein to research the problem and provided him with a year-long leave of absence to do so (McAulye, Giever, &Mays, 1998; Supreme Court of Florida, 2004). His subsequent research disclosed that a substantial majority of the target population had been incarcerated for drug offenses. Furthermore, this same segment of the inmate population had revolved in and out of the criminal justice system because of problems associated with underlying drug addiction. Armed with Judge Klein’s research and his resulting promulgation of a court-supervised drug treatment program, Dade County, Florida, created the first treatment-based drug court program in 1989. Itwas designed to reduce the rate of criminal recidivism by joining drug treatment services with judicial intervention to directly address drug addiction, one of the root causes of that recidivism (National Criminal Justice Reference Service, 2005a, 2005b; Supreme Court of Florida, 2004).