RICHARDSON, Texas (Dec. 3, 2003) – A professor at The
University of Texas at Dallas (UTD) has received a federal grant to evaluate Dallas County’s juvenile
drug court program.

Dr. Simon Fass, associate professor of public affairs
in UTD’s School of Social Sciences, has won an award of $52,000 from the United States Department
of Justice to study the effectiveness of the innovative drug court program in reducing juvenile delinquency.   Fass’
grant is part of a larger award of $500,000 that the Dallas County Juvenile Department will use to
fund the court for the next three years.

Juvenile drug courts are intensive, judicially supervised
treatment programs intended to reduce substance abuse and delinquency among youth and their families.   Under
the program, judges impose a range of sanctions and incentives to hold youth – who are subject to
frequent drug testing – accountable for their actions.   The court approach differs from standard
judicial practice wherein a young person violating drug laws might simply get a warning for a first
offense, be placed on probation for a second, and along the way receive limited or no counseling
and treatment.

The drug court idea has grown in popularity across
the country since the mid-1990s and was first implemented in Dallas County with local funding two
years ago.

“The premise of the drug court is that if you
can get a kid and his or her family before a judge in the early stages of problem behavior and, simultaneously,
take appropriate remedial action, the chance of relapse will be lowered,” said Fass.   “The
evaluation plans to test this premise by comparing re-arrest rates and other delinquency indicators
among youngsters who are randomly assigned to participate in the program with others who, although
equally eligible to participate, are randomly assigned to conventional judicial procedures.   Monitoring
post-program re-arrest rates in both groups for up to three years should help determine what difference,
if any, the drug court makes on delinquency.”

According to Fass, this will be among only a handful
of studies in the U.S. that use experimental methods to measure the effectiveness of a juvenile drug
court.   He estimates that 700 to 800 juvenile offenders will appear before the local drug court
during the three-year period of the study.

About
UTD
The University of Texas at Dallas, located at the convergence of Richardson, Plano and Dallas in the heart
of the complex of major multinational technology corporations known as the Telecom Corridor, enrolls
about 13,700 students. The school’s freshman class traditionally stands at the forefront of Texas state universities
in terms of average SAT scores. The university offers a broad assortment of bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral
degree programs. For additional information about UTD, please visit the university’s web site at www.utdallas.edu.