Specialty courts: current issues and future prospects

The reasons individual offenders engage in criminal activity are numerous and varied. Three key priority areas have emerged in recent years – reducing crime related to drug dependency and mental health, reducing the over-representation of Indigenous offenders and reducing the incidence of domestic violence. Policy-makers and criminal justice practitioners have recently responded with the development of specialty courts designed to tackle specific problem behaviour and associated issues. This paper examines the history and development of the specialty court concept in Australia. It shows that the programs, although having the same overall aim of reducing reoffending, have significantly different structures as they attempt to deal with very different problems. This paper also reviews the key evaluations of specialty court programs conducted to date. If we are to understand what works and what doesn’t, long-term assessment and evaluations are required of all specialty courts.