Substance Use & Misuse, 46:1523–1535, 2011 Copyright C  2011 Informa Healthcare USA, Inc. ISSN: 1082-6084 print / 1532-2491 online DOI: 10.3109/10826084.2010.537007 ORIGINAL ARTICLE The Impact of Substance User Treatment Participation on Legal Employment and Income Among Probationers and Parolees Hung-En Sung 1 and Doris Chu 2 1 Department of Criminal Justice, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, New York, NewYork, USA; 2 Department of Criminology, Sociology, & Geography, Arkansas State University, Jonesboro, Arkansas, USA Employment is essential for recovery. But treatment could conflict with work schedules, and employment gains could be short lived. This study examined how employment and income varied during and after treat- ment, what aspects of treatment impacted on em- ployment, and whether treatment improved income. Baseline and follow-up data were analyzed for 760 probationers and parolees in 11 US cities that par- ticipated in the 1992–1995 Drug Abuse Treatment Outcomes Study. Results showed that only residen- tial/inpatient treatment was associated, temporarily, with employment. Retention, compliance, and self- efficacy were correlated to posttreatment employment. However, treatment had no impact on income, which was determined by education and work history. Keywords employment, income, substance use, treatment, criminal offenders, recovery INTRODUCTION Stable and legitimate employment is an important goal of substance user treatment as well as an indicator of successful recovery from drug and alcohol addiction (Hall, Prendergast, & Wellisch, 2004; McLellan, Gutman, & Lynch, 2003). Numerous studies have consistently documented that employment prevents drug use relapse and criminal recidivism (Freudenberg, Daniels, & Crum, 2005; O’Connell, 2003; Siegal, Li, & Rapp, 2002; Sung, 2001; Uggen, 2000). The failure to find employment 1 Treatment can be briefly and usefully defined as a planned, goal-directed, temporally structured change process, of necessary quality, appropriateness, and conditions (endogenous and exogenous), which is bounded (culture, place, time, etc.) and can be categorized into professional-based, tradition-based, mutual-help-based (AA, NA, etc.), and self-help (“natural recovery”) models. There are no unique models or techniques used with substance users—of whatever types and heterogeneities—which are not also used with nonsubstance users. In the West, with the relatively new ideology of “harm reduction” and the even newer quality of life (QOL) treatment-driven model, there is now a new set of goals in addition to those derived from/associated with the older tradition of abstinence-driven models. Treatment is implemented in a range of environments, ambulatory, within institutions that can include controlled environments. Editor’s note. 2 The journal’s style utilizes the category substance abuse as a diagnostic category. Substances are used or misused; living organisms are and can be abused. Editor’s note. Address correspondence to Hung-En Sung, Department of Criminal Justice, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, 899 Tenth Avenue, New York, NY, 10019; E-mail: hsung@jjay.cuny.edu. forces substance users to go on and off the welfare and criminal justice systems (Chandler, Meisel, & Jordan, 2004; Morgenstern, Hogue, Dasaro, Kuerbis, & Dauber, 2008; Schmidt, Zabkiewicz, Jacobs, & Wiley, 2007); as a matter of fact, longitudinal evidence is that the exclusion from legitimate employment is most recalcitrant among chronic substance users (McCoy, Comerford, & Metsch, 2007). Individuals with long histories of drug and alcohol use and a low trajectory of earned income often display behaviors and attitudes that diminish their competitive- ness in the labor market (Carpenedo et al., 2007; Sung, 2001). Therefore, effective treatment for substance-using criminal offenders, on the one hand, applies interventions targeted at ending their physical and psychological dependence on addictive substances; on the other hand, it bridges their return to society as productive citizens (Comeford, 1999; Sung, 2001; Walker & Leukefeld, 2002). Without mutually reinforcing each other, neither abstinence alone nor employment alone can pave the way out of crime. Plausible Effects of Substance User Treatment on Employment and Income There is a wide consensus that substance user treatment 1 improves an offender’s ability to get, maintain, and up- grade employment (French, Zarkin, Hubbard, & Rachal, 1993; Hall et al., 2004). Substance user treatment ap- pears to have an impact on posttreatment employment among substance-using 2 offenders not only when it is offered as a substitute for or alternative to traditional 1523 Subst Use Misuse Downloaded from informahealthcare.com by Dr John Kleinig on 08/23/11 For personal use only.