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Exploring the Impact of Technical Violations on Probation Revocations in the Context of Drug Court

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Abstract

Prior research indicates a large number of drug court participants commit technical violations, subsequently increasing the likelihood of revocation. However, there is limited research investigating the potential heterogeneous effects of technical violations on probation revocation in the context of drug court participation as a condition of probation. The current study provides an initial investigation into the relationship between specific categories of technical violations for offenders court-ordered to participate in a drug court. Results indicate that while the total number of violations predicts revocation and jail sanctions, specific violations have varying effects. Specifically, positive drug tests during court participation significantly predicted probation revocation. Regarding jail sanctions, all categories of violations with the exception of failure to pay and “other” violations were predictive of receiving jail time. Policy implications for probation practice are provided.

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Data Availability

Secondary data was provided directly by the probation agency; thus, it is not available for public use.

Notes

  1. An “Other” Race category was created to include the one court participant that was Asian. However, as there was only one observation this individual was included in the White reference category.

  2. The state oversight agency requires all probation departments to report certain data using the exact same variable attributes, and provides the attributes for level of education. Moreover, state guidelines require offenders with a 6th grade level of education or below to be referred to adult literacy classes, those with less than a high school diploma (7th to 11th grade) are to be referred to General Equivalency Diploma classes, thus the categorization of education levels in this study.

  3. While there are no known validation studies published using the TRAS, the instrument it was based on, the ORAS was used on a diverse sample from Texas and was found to be predictive of reoffending. Thus, modifying the ORAS for Texas-specific legal factors resulted in the adopted TRAS instrument (Lovins et al. 2018).

  4. 1st degree felony carries a punishment of 5–99 years in prison; 2nd degree felony carries a punishment of 2–20 years in prison; 3rd degree felony carries a punishment of 2–10 years in prison; and, a state jail felony carries a punishment of 6 months to 24 months in a state jail facility, which is a facility for the less serious felonies designed to separate these lower level felonies from the more serious felonies in the standard state penitentiary.

  5. The variable Age was log transformed to meet normality assumptions. The variables Total Violations and Jail Sanctions were transformed using the square root to meet normality assumptions.

  6. As the results were substantively the same these Tables were not provided in the manuscript. The results of the supplemental analyses are available upon request.

  7. AIC and BIC fit statistics were assessed to ensure the best-fitting models.

  8. Due to space constraints, the results for the Failure to Pay model are not reported in the Table as they were non-significant. These results are available upon request.

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  1. Department of Criminal Justice, University of North Texas, 1155 Union Circle #305130, Denton, TX, 76203–5017, USA

    Haley R. Zettler

  2. Taylor Callahan & Coleman, Bexar, and Hidalgo Counties CSCD, P.O. Box 6848, Granbury, TX, 76049, USA

    Kelli D. Martin

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Correspondence to Haley R. Zettler.

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Zettler, H.R., Martin, K.D. Exploring the Impact of Technical Violations on Probation Revocations in the Context of Drug Court. Am J Crim Just 45, 1003–1023 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12103-020-09529-1

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