Drug Testing Often Part of Supervised Release

Regular drug testing often is one of the conditions for pretrial release in federal court or supervised release after time in prison for those convicted of federal crimes. In the early months of 2011, more than half of the some 30,000 federal defendants on pretrial release were designated for drug testing. And more than 57 percent of the some 130,000 federal offenders on supervised release were under a court-imposed duty to submit to post-conviction drug tests. The overwhelming majority of drug tests involve the analysis of urine samples. In the past year, at least 1.2 million such samples were collected and analyzed by the federal judiciarys probation and pretrial services system.