Transforming Criminal Justice Responses to Substance Use: Impacts on Crime, Housing, and Health Outcomes

Drug overdose deaths in the U.S. reached a record high of 107,941 in 2022, three quarters of which involved opioids. In response to the scale of the epidemic, hundreds of police departments across the country have begun to divert individuals who possess drugs away from arrest and into substance use treatment. This paper evaluates the impact of this approach using arrest-level variation in diversion eligibility in Chicago between 2010-22 in a triple difference framework. We find that drug arrest diversion primarily reached individuals who used narcotics every day, increased connections with substance use treatment, and reduced subsequent arrests, including arrests for violent offenses, but had no discernible impact on fatal or non-fatal overdose risk.