Overview
The Drug Interventions Programme (DIP) is the UK's main Criminal Justice initiative aimed at engaging substance misusing offenders in drug treatment. It does this through a variety of methods, some coercive, such as the Tough Choices program, and some relying on voluntary engagement. Class A drug-misusing offenders are identified on their journey through the CJS and steered towards treatment and wraparound support. Key points of intervention include following a positive drugs test in police custody, and following release from prison.
DIP's key partners include police, the probation service, prisons, courts and other criminal justice agencies, as well as the National Treatment Agency and the Department of Health. It is hard to discern the precise cost of DIP. Whilst DIP Key Messages (of February 2009) identified that 'over £600 million has been invested in DIP,', DIP's Operational Handbook (also 2009) put the figure at 'over £900m'.
Some evidence has been taken to suggest that DIP has been effective in achieving its aims, though a serious shortfall in methodologically rigorous evaluations makes such claims problematic. Nonetheless, in his foreword to the 2008 Drug Strategy the Home Secretary claimed that DIP coercion and case management have 'contributed to a fall in recorded acquisitive crime of around 20 per cent'. A short while later, DIP Key Messages made rather grander claims: 'since 2003, acquisitive crime (which is strongly associated with class A substance misuse) has fallen by 32 per cent in England and Wales.
Read more about this topic: Drug Interventions Programme