In terms of savings, we've had a very difficult time measuring all of the savings that drug treatment courts effect, because the people we're dealing with are already consuming many of the services that are being delivered. However, they're doing it in a rather haphazard fashion.
The beauty of a drug treatment court is that we have these regular appearances before a judge. We're able to begin the case management process and use the courts to better assign the use of the services within the community that are already being accessed by an individual. We could have, for instance, one person accessing similar services at four or five different agencies not involved with the drug treatment court system. Once they're involved with the drug treatment court, there are the regular appearances in court, the regular attendances at treatment, and visits with their case manager, so we know exactly where they're going and we can then better coordinate the delivery of those services.
As I mentioned earlier, some of the costs are very difficult to capture. In Toronto, we followed one man—this was not through the drug treatment court, but through one of the shelters I managed before my involvement—through his health card and discovered that he had consumed $350,000 worth of emergency room visits in a one-year period. If we can have a person who is getting their medical care through a community health centre instead of at emergency, there is a significant savings there. Again, though, this is very difficult to capture because we're trying to get information from systems that are not willing to readily share the information because of Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act issues.