Ten Takeaways from All Rise 2026: What Treatment Court Teams Should Be Talking About

I had the privilege of attending the 2026 All Rise Conference on behalf of MATCP. After four days of educational sessions, presentations, and conversations with treatment court professionals from across the country, I came home with pages of notes, dozens of ideas, and more than a few reminders of why treatment courts work. But after sorting it through, I kept coming back to ten takeaways that I believe every treatment court team should be discussing.

Some are familiar. Others reflect the continuing evolution of our field. Collectively, however, they point toward one overarching principle: effective treatment courts are not about doing the same thing for every participant. They are about using evidence, assessment, and professional judgment to provide the right intervention for the right person at the right time.

Here are my ten takeaways from All Rise 2026.

1. Match the Right Participant to the Right Intervention

This may have been the dominant message of the conference.

Treatment courts have traditionally been designed for High Risk/High Need participants. But the larger conversation at All Rise increasingly focused on what an evidence-based justice system should do with everyone else. High Risk/Low Need, Low Risk/High Need, and Low Risk/Low Need individuals require different approaches. An intervention that produces excellent outcomes for one group may be ineffective, or even counterproductive, for another.

That makes validated risk and need assessments more than simply an admission tool. Are you using validated tools? According to research presented at the conference, many courts across the country are not. Validated assessments are fundamental to accurately understanding the person standing in front of us and determining the interventions most likely to produce successful outcomes.

The question for every team is straightforward: Are we matching people to interventions, or are we trying to make people fit our programs?

2. Keep Following the Best Practice Standards

The Adult Treatment Court Best Practice Standards are not new, but they are not static either. The original Standards established an evidence-based framework for treatment courts, and the more recent revisions reflect what ongoing research has taught us about how those practices can be improved. What was particularly striking at All Rise was the depth of the research now supporting both the Standards and their continued evolution.

Research presented by Shannon Carey and Dr. Douglas Marlowe now incorporates more than 71,000 participants from over 300 treatment courts.

That matters. Best practices are not simply a collection of recommendations from people who believe they know what works. Increasingly, we can explain why a practice works and point to the research supporting it.

The challenge for established courts is therefore not simply knowing the Standards. It is the willingness to examine our own practices when the research tells us something different from what we have traditionally done.

3. Think “Sanctions and Service Adjustments”

This was one of the most important philosophical reminders of the conference.

When a participant violates a program expectation, our instinct may be to ask, “What sanction is appropriate?” The better first question may be: Does this participant need accountability, or does this participant need a service adjustment?

That distinction requires us to understand proximal and distal behaviors. Sanctions should generally be used to address proximal behaviors; those behaviors participants are reasonably capable of controlling at their current stage of recovery. When a participant is struggling with a distal behavior or goal, however, the research tells us that the appropriate response is generally a service adjustment rather than a sanction.

Accountability remains essential. But evidence-based accountability requires us to understand the behavior, where the participant is in the recovery process, and whether our response should be a sanction, a service adjustment, or some combination of the two.

4. Build Recovery Capital from Day One

Recovery Capital should not be something we begin discussing as graduation approaches.

Long-term recovery depends upon the resources participants develop around themselves: healthy relationships, stable housing, employment, education, recovery support, family connections, and meaningful ties to the community. The conference emphasized intentionally building those resources throughout every phase of treatment court.

For some courts, fully embracing Recovery Capital may require more than adding another requirement to a phase sheet. One court described spending approximately a year redesigning its entire phase structure around Recovery Capital principles.

That raises a larger question: Are our phases measuring completed requirements, or are they measuring progress toward sustainable recovery?

5. Positive Reinforcement Is Everyone’s Job

Incentives do not belong exclusively to the judge.

One session addressing Best Practice Standards emphasized that every member of the multidisciplinary team has a role in recognizing positive participant behavior.

A sincere acknowledgment from a probation officer, treatment provider, defense attorney, prosecutor, coordinator, or law enforcement representative may carry more weight than we realize.

Treatment courts work in part because participants experience the justice system differently. When an entire team notices progress, not just failure, we reinforce the behaviors we want participants to repeat.

6. Make Graduation About the Participant

One of the simplest suggestions I heard may also be one of the easiest to implement: at graduation, replace “we” with “you.”

Not “We helped you turn your life around.”

Instead: “You accomplished this.”

Graduation should reinforce participant ownership and self-efficacy. It should recognize not simply that someone completed program requirements, but who that person has become along the way. Presenters encouraged teams to identify meaningful milestones and “anchor memories” that participants can carry with them after treatment court ends.

Our teams should be proud of the work we do. Graduation, however, belongs to the graduate.

7. Team Training Matters; Including the New Person

Treatment courts are multidisciplinary by design. Yet the research presented at All Rise identified an important vulnerability.

Approximately 90% of treatment courts across the country added at least one new team member during 2025, while only about half reported having a formal orientation process for new members.

A new prosecutor, defense attorney, probation officer, treatment provider, coordinator, or even judge may understand their profession very well while knowing very little about the treatment court philosophy.

We cannot assume people will learn treatment courts simply by attending staffing.

Every new member needs to understand their own role, the roles of everyone else, the Best Practice Standards, and, most importantly, why treatment courts operate differently from traditional courtrooms.

8. Language Matters

Words are not incidental to treatment.

A well-attended session on the power of language challenged professionals to consider how terminology can either support recovery or reinforce stigma. Person-centered language recognizes the individual before the diagnosis, criminal history, or substance use disorder.

That principle extends beyond avoiding words such as “addict.” It means examining how we talk about relapse, compliance, failure, success, and recovery.

Language also affects procedural justice. Participants notice how professionals speak to them and about them. Dignity and accountability are not competing concepts. We can hold people accountable without defining them by their worst decisions.

9. Treatment Court Professionals Make a Difference

For a conference so heavily grounded in research, one of its strongest messages had nothing to do with statistics.

Again and again, treatment court graduates talked about the person who made a difference: a judge who listened, a coordinator who refused to give up, or a team that continued believing in someone who had stopped believing in themselves.

The conference repeatedly emphasized that relationships matter and that treatment court professionals translate research into actual participant outcomes.

Evidence gives us the roadmap. Standards give us the framework. But neither changes a life by itself.

People do.

10. Never Stop Learning

Perhaps this is the takeaway that connects all the others.

Treatment courts continue to evolve because the research continues to evolve. Recovery Capital is changing how we think about phases. Service adjustments are refining how we respond to behavior. Risk and need research is changing how we target interventions. Artificial intelligence is beginning to affect justice-system operations. And All Rise itself appears to be broadening the conversation toward a comprehensive evidence-based justice system.

For those of us who have worked in treatment courts for years, experience is valuable, but experience can also make familiar practices difficult to question.

One session was appropriately titled “Old Habits Die Hard.” Treatment court professionals routinely ask participants to make difficult changes because the evidence tells us those changes will improve their lives. We should be willing to impose the same expectation upon ourselves and our programs.

The question should never simply be, “What have we always done?”

It should be, “What does the evidence tell us we should do?”

That may be the most important lesson I brought home from All Rise 2026. The future of treatment courts will not be defined by finding one perfect program or intervention. It will be defined by our ability to keep learning, accurately assess the people we serve, adapt when the research changes, and provide the right intervention to the right person at the right time.

And then, as treatment court professionals, do the human work necessary to make that evidence matter.