Greg Midgette

• University of Maryland, College Park

Research Summary Two perceptions drive interest in finding ways of diverting more 911 calls from police to civilian first responders: (1) police responses can result in inadvertent harm to citizens and (2) many calls to which police respond require services that police often cannot provide. Thus, using other personnel may improve police–citizen rel...

24/7 Sobriety programs largely focus on reducing alcohol consumption among justice-involved individuals whose alcohol use has led them to repeatedly threaten public safety. Participants are ordered to abstain from alcohol use and subject to frequent alcohol testing (e.g., twice daily breathalyzers, remote alcohol monitoring); those testing positive...

This study examines the associations of 24/7 sobriety programs with reduced alcohol-involved offenses.

Objective: Our goal was to develop a framework to test for implicit racial bias in discretionary decisions made by community supervision agents in conditions with increasing information ambiguity. Hypotheses: We reasoned that as in-person contact decreases, community supervision officers' specific knowledge of clients would be replaced by heuris...

Reforms to deploy civilian responders to non-criminal emergency calls may reduce demands on police departments and negative interactions between police and civilians, but there is presently little empirical evidence on the feasibility of these proposals. We develop a model of emergency call risk to evaluate which calls could be transitioned to civi...

Objectives Evaluate the deterrent effect of a program that increases the certainty and celerity of sanction for arrestees ordered to abstain from alcohol and other drugs on substance-impaired driving arrests.Methods We examine participant compliance with orders to abstain from alcohol and other drug use via breathalyzer, body-worn continuous alcoho...

Background and Aims The US state of South Dakota’s 24/7 Sobriety Program (24/7) requires individuals charged or convicted of alcohol-involved offenses to avoid alcohol and submit to twice-daily or continuous alcohol testing. We evaluated the impact of the 24/7 program in the US state of Montana. Methods Using data from everyone in Montana who was...

Background: Globally, heroin and other opioids account for more than half of deaths and years-of-life-lost due to drug use and comprise one of the four major markets for illegal drugs. Having sound estimates of the number of problematic heroin users is fundamental to formulating sound health and criminal justice policies. Researchers and policymak...

Research Summary Criminal justice practitioners increasingly seek out efficient means of community supervision supplanting face‐to‐face interactions with practices that are less onerous to administrators and clients. We examined the differential impact of remote supervision for low‐risk probationers by race. Remote reporting greatly reduces or elim...

Decisionmakers continue to search for new ways to deter criminal behavior that do not rely on increasing the severity of punishment. This paper evaluates South Dakota's 24/7 Sobriety Program—a novel, large‐scale intervention requiring those arrested for or convicted of an alcohol‐related offense to abstain from alcohol and submit to alcohol tests m...

As US states move toward various forms of adult access to cannabis, there has been a great interest in measuring the impact of such changes on adolescent cannabis use. Two recent prominent analyses have used Monitoring the Future (MTF), a nationally representative survey of students, to examine the effects. We compared MTF data for California and f...

Aims: To (1) assess trends and variation in the market share of product types and potency sold in a legal cannabis retail market, and (2) estimate how potency and purchase quantity influence price variation for cannabis flower. Design: Secondary analysis of publicly available data from Washington State's cannabis straceability system spanning Ju...

AimsDrug policy strategies and discussions often use prevalence of drug use as a primary performance indicator. However, three other indicators are at least as relevant: the number of heavy users, total expenditures and total amount consumed. This paper stems from our efforts to develop annual estimates of these three measures for cocaine (includin...

A sense of scale is a prerequisite to thinking sensibly about illicit drug markets. For example, knowing whether a country consumes tens, hundreds, or thousands of metric tons (MTs) of a prohibited substance is critical for understanding the impact of a three-MT seizure at a border crossing. But decisionmakers need more than a sense of scale; they...

Data from surveys of arrestees and the household population in the U.S. suggest there is only modest overlap among demand for the big three expensive illegal drugs (cocaine/crack, heroin, and methamphetamine). In particular, the number of chronic users of these substances (defined as consuming on four or more days in the previous month) is only abo...

Objectives: We examined the public health impact of South Dakota's 24/7 Sobriety Project, an innovative program requiring individuals arrested for or convicted of alcohol-involved offenses to submit to breathalyzer tests twice per day or wear a continuous alcohol monitoring bracelet. Those testing positive are subject to swift, certain, and modest...

The past near decade of conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan has changed the way the force is managed. To meet the demands of protracted conflict in those theaters, the Army has adopted a rotational deployment strategy based on the Army Force Generation (ARFORGEN) model. In this model, units rotate through various levels of readiness, with a portion (a...