The Kings County Drug Treatment Alternative-to-Prison (DTAP) program, created by District Attorney Charles J. Hynes in October 1990, has been recognized as one of the nation’s most successful diversion programs. DTAP aims to treat nonviolent, drug-addicted chronic felons.  DTAP’s objective is threefold:  to (1) reduce drug abuse, (2) improve public safety, and (3) save money. 

DTAP provides substance abuse treatment under a deferred sentencing model.  Participants must plead guilty to a felony prior to their admission into the program.  The plea agreement includes a specific prison term that will be imposed in the event of treatment failure.  The prospect of prison has proven very effective in maintaining high treatment retention rates.  In recognition that relapse is part of the recovery process, DTAP also has a selective readmission policy.  Defendants who relapse or experience treatment setbacks are readmitted to DTAP if they express a genuine desire to continue treatment and pose no threat to the provider or the community.  Defendants who successfully complete DTAP are allowed to withdraw their guilty pleas, and the charges against them are dismissed. 

This “tough and compassionate” approach to the drug-abusing offender population has yielded very positive results.  As of October 14, 2010, the end date of DTAP’s “fiscal” year, 2,890 defendants had been accepted into DTAP.  In its twentieth year of operation, DTAP continued to maintain high treatment retention and low recidivism rates and to produce enormous cost savings.  

• One thousand two-hundred and fifty (1,250) DTAP participants have successfully completed treatment since the program’s inception.  In this past fiscal year alone, 55 participants completed DTAP.  The diversion of all these DTAP graduates represents over 50 million dollars in economic benefits that have been realized from lower costs of incarceration, public assistance, healthcare, and recidivism, combined with the tax revenues generated by the graduates. 

• Under DTAP’s original deferred prosecution model, participants showed a one-year retention rate of 64 percent.  Since 1998, when DTAP shifted to a deferred sentencing model, that rate has increased to 75 percent.

• DTAP graduates have a five-year post-treatment recidivism rate that is almost half the rate for comparable offenders who served time in prison.

• The success of the DTAP model has prompted the program’s implementation by all of the New York City district attorney’s offices and several others throughout the New York State. 

• The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA) at Columbia University has issued a report on its federally funded five-year evaluation of DTAP.  CASA’s positive findings confirm that DTAP is a cost-effective measure for reducing crime and substance abuse among chronic drug-addicted offenders.  In addition, in 2005, a consensus panel of national experts assembled by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services recommended DTAP as one of the treatment models that exemplified effective diversion programs.