How Compris Can Give Specialty Courts a Tool for Better Outcomes

Across the country, as states grapple with tightening budgets and growing demands on the justice system, specialty treatment courts are on the chopping block. 

Treatment courts help people break the cycle of addiction, mental illness, and repeated incarceration. They hold participants accountable while giving them access to treatment and the support needed to rebuild their lives and for successful re-entry.. 

Arguably the biggest measure of successful community re-entry is treatment court graduation. Participation alone reduces recidivism rates from 68% to 53%. 

But the lowest recidivism rates come from successful completion—only 19% of treatment court graduates recidivate.

Unfortunately, completion rates vary significantly from one court to another, leaving many courts looking for ways to improve participant success.

This is where Compris can help.

In our conversations with specialty courts, we've consistently heard the need for something beyond criminogenic risk assessments. Compris tracks ongoing risk, resilience, and motivation metrics. It identifies participants who are beginning to struggle so judges and treatment teams can intervene before relapse, disengagement, or program dropout. 

While criminogenic risk assessments provide an important baseline, they have several limitations:

• Reactive, incident-driven intervention: 

  Based on history & program non-compliance (e.g. failure to appear, drug testing)

• Lack individualized treatment guidance 

  Informs pretrial release decisions, safety, and the need for treatment

• Mostly static with limited dynamic risk insight 

  Not designed for real-time tracking or continuous monitoring

• Require training to administer and score

  Avg. 2 days training  and 1-3 hrs to administer, score, and interpret

By comparison, Compris’ digital behavioral health platform can help improve success by:

• Proactively assessing likelihood of success & non-completion risk,

  Based on evidence-based risks, strengths, motivations, and denial

• Informing judicial decision-making with individualized Care Plans, targeted interventions, and SDoH insights

• Dynamically measuring progress, engagement, and recovery over time

  e.g. Wellness IndexTM, motivation, resilience, & substance usage

• Offering a simple, online 15-minute tool requiring no training, and delivering immediate, actionable results

If we're going to invest in specialty treatment courts, we should also invest in the tools that help them achieve even better outcomes.

Every additional graduate means far more than one person's success. It means stronger families, safer communities, fewer victims, and lower costs to taxpayers.

Compris extends the value of traditional criminogenic risk assessments by providing ongoing, objective insight into each participant's behavioral health, recovery progress, resilience, and motivation throughout the program. By helping judges and treatment teams identify emerging challenges early, Compris supports more timely interventions, stronger participant engagement, and ultimately, more successful graduations.

Better measurement leads to better decisions. Better decisions lead to better outcomes. And better outcomes help ensure specialty treatment courts continue changing lives while demonstrating the measurable value policymakers and funders increasingly expect.