The people who come into drug treatment courts typically are some of the most disadvantaged people in society. They're very often homeless when they come in. They have very high needs, and because of their history, they have quite a high risk of reoffending.
One of the difficulties in doing a national evaluation and coming to some kind of conclusive data is how different each court is. As Dr. Ward expressed, they really are built on community models that respond to the unique needs and structure of each community. I can say that in Ottawa the average participant who comes into our program--we assess them very carefully before they come in and we do some extensive interviews with them--uses, on average, $500 a day worth of drugs before coming into our program. All of this, of course, has to be supported by criminal activity. And you understand, of course, that you don't commit $500 worth of crime to buy $500 worth of drugs. The cost is much higher than that.
We did some analysis within our program and found that in a one-year period, approximately $3 million in drugs were not consumed in our community. That doesn't even consider the crime required to support that amount of consumption. So I think the courts are very effective.
In terms of reducing criminal activity, in our first year of operation we operated differently. You have to remember that drug treatment courts have been running in Canada for about three years, during the most recent funding agreement anyway, and we're learning as we go. In our first year, about 40-some per cent of our clients reoffended while being involved in the program. We increased the intensity. We brought in some criminal thinking. And we dropped that down to about 14%. It's gone lower since.
You have to remember that there are two types of reoffending: the one they get caught for and the one they don't get caught for. If somebody's using $500 a day, they're committing a criminal act every day--many, many criminal acts. I spoke to one client recently who told me that he would shoplift all day, until the stores closed, and then he would start breaking into cars. I like to think that any day a client is in drug treatment court and not using and not committing crime is a good day and is a benefit to our community.