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The Drug Use Forecasting (DUF) program is a measurement system established by the National Institute of Justice to test booked arrestees for illegal drug use. DUF has consistently shown high levels of illicit drug use among arrestees, including those charged with crimes unrelated to drug use. Measuring the extent and nature of this illicit drug use is essential to, first, determining how severe the drug problem is, and second, developing ideal methods for combating it. Part I of this analysis presents an overview of the drug/crime connection. Part II describes the methodology of the DUF project. Part III, first, describes the utility of clustering as a statistical tool, and second, identifies homogeneous clusters of drug users from a Philadelphia population of 1,329 arrestees. Part IV assesses the policy implications of these classifications.

We advance discussion of structural inequality by operationalizing “concentrated” disadvantage in terms of highly disadvantaged communities located at the spatial core of contiguous areas of high disadvantage, and by testing the extent to which such location achieves an independent effect on violence. Using exploratory spatial data analysis and count modeling, we show that highly disadvantaged communities located at the center of a contiguous ghetto have significantly higher rates of violence than other highly disadvantaged communities, but that this relationship is moderated by structural disadvantage. In addition to finding a significant interaction between these “deserts” of disadvantage and structural disadvantage, as they relate to violent crime, we also observe that in desert communities, disadvantage has a diminishing effect on violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]