Cochrane reviews into interventions for drug-using offenders

Posted on 25 June 2015

Two reviews by Health Sciences’ Senior Research Fellow Amanda Perry into interventions for drug-using offenders have been published in a feature on Cochrane’s main website.

The reviews as to whether pharmacological and mental health interventions reduce drug use and criminal activity among drug-using offenders looked into 14 trials with 2,647 participants involving pharmacological interventions, as well as eight trials with 2,058 participants focusing on mental illness interventions.

When comparing the drugs to one another, researchers noted no significant differences between the drug comparisons. Overall, the mental health interventions reported limited success with reducing self-reported drug use; they did report some success with reducing re-incarceration rates, but not re-arrests.

Amanda, who is part of the Mental Health and Addiction Research Group, said: “The findings suggest that mental health programmes and pharmacological interventions can help reduce criminal activity and re-incarceration rates, but limited success with reducing drug use. Findings were limited mainly to male adult offenders. It’s important that future research investigates a variety of possible intervention programmes with varied offender populations.”

Cochrane is a global independent network of researchers, professionals, patients, carers and people interested in health. Its contributors work together to produce credible, accessible health information that is free from commercial sponsorship and other conflicts of interest and its work is recognised as representing an international gold standard for high quality, trusted information.

For the full review, log on to: http://www.cochrane.org/news/featured-review-interventions-drug-using-offenders.