New White Paper Presents Strategies for Courts When Dealing With Alcohol

Today AMS has published a new White Paper, The 5 Obstacles to Alcohol Monitoring, which looks at some of the toughest issues that make dealing with alcohol particularly difficult for courts, probation, and treatment providers in the criminal justice system.

The paper provides an in-depth, scientific perspective on challenges ranging from the body’s metabolism of alcohol (rapid compared to drugs) to the impact alcohol and sobriety can have on all of the strongest predictors of success for criminal offenders (employment, a place to live, solid friends, strong program participation).

The White Paper is designed to drive awareness about what a true Sober Day typically means, for both a court and for an alcohol-dependent offender. A Sober Day is defined as a 24-hour period where an offender can prove, through testing done at least once an hour, that they were completely sober and compliant. Sober Days are one of the most relevant metrics to-date relative to alcohol-involved offenders. Sober Days are evidence-based and quantifiable, and they underscore the impact of sobriety on both the individual being monitored and the jurisdiction managing multiple offenders.

According to data we’ve compiled of the more than 249,000 offenders we’ve monitored to-date, on average, 99.3% of our clients are completely compliant on any given day—a statistically valid Sober Day. The statistic is based on an analysis of the more than 1.1 billion alcohol tests using SCRAM CAM, which we first launched to the corrections market in April of 2003.

The Sober Days White Paper compiles research, peer-reviewed studies, and information published by other organizations that can help criminal justice professionals better address the challenges of alcohol. As a company that sells a monitoring product, we can tell you about the importance of Sober Days. But there is a lengthy list of other organizations, researchers, Federal agencies, and jurisdictions that have researched and announced their support for the importance of sobriety—true Sober Days—for alcohol-involved offenders.