PS450 Unit 6 Courts and Coordination Paper Example

Every Other Tuesday at the Courthouse: A PS450 Unit 6 Courts and Service Coordination Paper

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

PS450: Case Management in Clinical Settings

Unit 6 Courts and Service Coordination Paper

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The client, the court team and the program are composite; the meta-analyses and study cited are real.

The Court and Its Partners

Brandi came into our county's family treatment court in Huntington after child protective services removed her two children. A family treatment court combines a dependency case, in which the state decides whether children can safely return home, with intensive substance use treatment and close judicial supervision. Every other Tuesday, Brandi appears before the judge, who reviews her progress, praises gains and imposes sanctions for missed requirements.

Five systems meet in her case. The court sets requirements and timelines. Child protective services is responsible for the children's safety and makes recommendations about visits and custody. Our outpatient program provides treatment. Her defense attorney and the state's attorney represent legal interests. And Brandi herself, whose goal is to bring her children home. As her case manager, I sit at the point where those systems exchange information.

What the Research Shows

Mitchell et al. (2012) conducted a meta-analysis of evaluations of drug courts, including adult, juvenile and driving-while-impaired courts. Adult drug courts reduced recidivism on average, with participants reoffending at meaningfully lower rates than comparison groups, and the effects lasted for several years after entry. Juvenile drug courts showed smaller effects. The authors noted that study quality varied and that the most rigorous studies tended to find smaller but still positive effects.

Family treatment courts aim at different outcomes: recovery and the safe reunification of children. Worcel et al. (2008) compared families in family treatment courts with similar families in standard child welfare cases. Parents in the courts got into treatment sooner, remained in it for more days and finished it more often, and their children spent less time in foster care and were more likely to be reunified. A later meta-analysis found that family treatment courts increased reunification rates and shortened time in out-of-home care, with less consistent evidence on whether children later reentered care (Zhang et al., 2019).

The research suggests family treatment courts work largely by getting parents into treatment faster and keeping them there, which is exactly what coordination is for.

A Staffing Meeting

Before each hearing, the court team holds a staffing meeting, in which members share updates and agree on recommendations to the judge. The meeting I attended in May shows coordination at work.

I reported that Brandi had attended every group and individual session, provided eight drug screens with one positive for methamphetamine, completed her housing application and started a job at a grocery store. The child protective services caseworker reported that her visits with her children had gone well, but that her daughter's school had called about an absence on a day Brandi had taken her for a visit. The treatment counselor, with Brandi's consent, reported that Brandi was working on trauma symptoms and that the positive screen followed a week of nightmares.

The team disagreed about the next step. The caseworker wanted to delay unsupervised visits because of the positive screen. The counselor argued that one positive screen in early trauma treatment was expected and that delaying visits would remove Brandi's strongest motivation. The defense attorney pointed out that the court's own policy treated early positives as part of recovery.

My role was to connect the facts. I pointed out that the school absence happened because the visit had been scheduled during school hours by the visitation center, not by Brandi, and offered to work with the center to move visits to afternoons. I also proposed that the team recommend unsupervised daytime visits on weekends, with an added drug screen, as a middle ground. The judge accepted that recommendation at the hearing.

Information and Consent

Coordination depends on information, and information carries risk. The federal privacy rule covering addiction treatment records, 42 CFR Part 2, is stricter than those for most health information, and Brandi signed specific consents allowing our program to share attendance, drug screen results and general progress with the court team. She did not consent to sharing the details of her trauma, which stayed with her counselor.

The line matters. When systems share information to coordinate services, they can also use it to monitor and punish. A positive screen reported to help the team adjust treatment could also be used to delay reunification. Brandi knows that what she says in treatment may reach the judge, and that knowledge can make clients less honest. Part of my job is to make sure she understands exactly what is shared, and to advocate in staffing meetings for responses that support treatment rather than only sanction.

Costs and Who Pays

Coordination also has a price. Our county's family treatment court serves about thirty families at a time, with a judge who gives up part of her docket, a coordinator, dedicated child welfare caseworkers and case managers like me with small caseloads. Those costs fall on the court system, the state child welfare agency and treatment providers, while many of the savings, such as fewer nights in foster care and fewer new cases later, show up in other budgets or years later. Cost studies of family treatment courts generally argue that the savings from shorter foster care stays can offset much of the extra spending, but those savings are hard for any single agency to see.

For Brandi, the cost question is not abstract. Her children's time with their grandmother is kinship care, which costs the state less than foster care, and her faster progress in treatment shortens the period in which the state is responsible for them. Coordination that keeps her on track is, among other things, a way of spending money where it does the most good.

What Coordination Adds

Without coordination, Brandi would answer to five systems separately. Each would see only its piece: the court, her compliance; child protective services, her children's safety; the program, her recovery. Conflicts, such as visits scheduled during school hours, would go unnoticed until they became problems. The research findings on faster treatment entry and longer retention depend on someone making the systems work together.

Conclusion

Family treatment courts improve recovery and reunification outcomes, according to the studies reviewed, and case management is one of the mechanisms that makes that possible. In Brandi's case, coordination meant connecting a school absence to a visitation schedule, turning a disagreement into a middle-ground recommendation and protecting the boundary between information that helps her and information that only watches her.

References

Mitchell, O., Wilson, D. B., Eggers, A., & MacKenzie, D. L. (2012). Assessing the effectiveness of drug courts on recidivism: A meta-analytic review of traditional and non-traditional drug courts. Journal of Criminal Justice, 40(1), 60-71. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcrimjus.2011.11.009

Worcel, S. D., Furrer, C. J., Green, B. L., Burrus, S. W. M., & Finigan, M. W. (2008). Effects of family treatment drug courts on substance abuse and child welfare outcomes. Child Abuse Review, 17(6), 427-443. https://doi.org/10.1002/car.1045

Zhang, S., Huang, H., Wu, Q., Li, Y., & Liu, M. (2019). The impacts of family treatment drug court on child welfare core outcomes: A meta-analysis. Child Abuse & Neglect, 88, 1-14. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chiabu.2018.10.014