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Highlights of Research on Drug- and Alcohol-Abusing Criminals

NCJ Number
167722
Author(s)
B D Johnson; E D Wish
Date Published
1986
Length
25 pages
Annotation
This paper reports the findings and policy implications from a federally funded 6-year program of research on the linkages among drugs, alcohol and crime.
Abstract
The research program examined the drugs-alcohol-crime relationship among youths via qualitative study of selected samples of youth in a typical American city. The study also examined the drugs-crime relationship among respondents from subgroups at very high risk for that behavior, especially among heroin users and prison and jail inmates. The study supported secondary analyses of existing data sets and conducted intensive studies of criminal events among criminal polydrug users who had committed some form of nondrug crime in the 24-36 hours preceding their interview. A companion summary addressed how heroin- and cocaine-abusing offenders interacted with the criminal justice and treatment systems, presented policy implications, and suggested new policy alternatives for various components of the criminal justice system. Research highlighted in this paper supports the following conclusions: (1) Criminal behavior is highly concentrated; (2) The most serious offenders exhibit very diverse patterns of criminality; (3) Arrest and incarceration records are poor indicators of the severity of individual crime patterns; (4) Crime rates vary directly according to the regularity of heroin use; and (5) The use of cocaine has been on the rise since the late 1970s and it has become the preferred hard drug among criminal subgroups. References, bibliography