0 - National Criminal Justice Reference Service

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conjunction with the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), initiated an evaluation project,
which has become known as the TRIAD6 drug treatment evaluation project.
A preliminary six-month follow up study (Federal Bureau of Prisons, 1998) examined drug
relapse and rearrest rates for 719 male and 180 female treatment subjects, compared to 805 male
and 162 female comparison subjects (inmates who had similar histories of drug abuse and met the
criteria for admission to the residential drug treatment programs). Measures of arrest and
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supervision revocation were based both on criminal records checks and interviews with federal
probation officers. Drug use measures were based upon self-report measures as well as urinalysis
results.
Researchers sampled treatment subjects fiom 20 different institutions, including all
security levels except maximum security. The residential programs included two components of
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treatment - an in-prison component and a transitional services component (as part of community
placement and supervision). The in-prison treatment programs consisted of two different levels of
duration - 9-month programs (500 hours) and 12-month programs (1,000 hours).
Male and female comparison subjects were drawn fiom more than 40 institutions, some of
which had residential drug abuse treatment programs and some of which did not. The comparison
subjects consisted of individuals who had histories of previous drug use and, therefore, would
have met the criteria for admission to the residential drug treatment programs. While the research
design was somewhat vulnerable to problem of selection bias and cross-site variation in
treatment implementation (Austin, 1998), Pelissier et al. (2001) more explicitly examined and
controlled for selection bias and other extraneous factors in their analyses than any other study of
prison-based drug treatment to date.
TRIAD is the acronym for ‘‘Treating Inmates’ Addiction to Drugs.”
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This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report has not
been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s)
and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.