Discretionary Justice: Looking Inside a Juvenile Drug Court

239 Pages·2011·0.721 MB·English

by  Leslie Paik

Discretionary Justice
Critical Issues in Crime and Society
Raymond J. Michalowski, Series Editor
Critical Issues in Crime and Society is oriented toward critical analysis of
contemporary problems in crime and justice. The series is open to a broad
range of topics, including specific types of crime, wrongful behavior by
economically or politically powerful actors, controversies over justice system
practices, and issues related to the intersection of identity, crime, and justice.
It is committed to offering thoughtful works that are accessible to scholars and
professional criminologists, general readers, and students.
For a list of titles in the series, see the last page of the book.
Discretionary Justice
h
Looking Inside a Juvenile
Drug Court
Leslie Paik
Rutgers University Press
New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Paik, Leslie.
Discretionary justice : looking inside a juvenile drug court / Leslie Paik.
p. cm. — (Critical issues in crime and society)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8135-5006-0 (hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8135-5007-7
(pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Juvenile courts—California. 2. Drug courts—California. 3. Youth—Drug
use—California. 4. Drug abuse—Treatment—Law and legislation—California.
5. Juvenile delinquents—Rehabilitation—California. I. Title.
KFC1196.P35 2011
345.794(cid:2)02770269—dc22
2010048420
A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available
from the British Library.
Copyright © 2011 by Leslie Paik
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, elec-
tronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without writ-
ten permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 100 Joyce
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Visit our Web site: http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu
Manufactured in the United States of America
Contents
Preface and Acknowledgments vii
1 Inside the Black Box of Drug Court Justice 1
2 Setting and Methods 17
3 What Court Day Is He? Intercourt Variations 28
4 Building Accountability through Assessments
of Noncompliance 41
5 Social Construction of Drug Test Results 76
6 It’s Not Just His Probation, It’s Mine:
Parental Involvement in the Drug Court 99
7 Youth Trajectories in the Court 128
8 The (In)justice of Discretion: Drug Courts as
Therapeutic Punishment and Therapeutic Justice 172
Appendix A Methods 183
Appendix B Concepts and Terms 191
Appendix C Additional Resources 193
Notes 197
Bibliography 209
Index 217
v

Preface and Acknowledgments
The idea for this book began before I started graduate school. In the mid-
1990s I worked at a nonprofit legal organization that designed, implemented,
and evaluated drug courts and other problem-solving courts. I saw the value
of these courts—helping offenders kick their drug addiction, keeping them
out of prison—but I also worried about the courts’ potential Big Brother
impact on the offenders with their expectations of behavioral change. As I was
discussing these thoughts with a senior staff member who had been involved
in criminal justice policy for twenty years, she responded that while it sounded
like we were imposing white middle-class values onto poor minorities, noth-
ing else had worked. I still think about that conversation often—namely, if
these courts do help to keep people out of jail or prison, are their moralistic
expectations of behavior worth it, especially considering the experience of
policy practitioners who have seen countless other attempts at reform fail?
I went to graduate school to explore that question but then was con-
fronted with another equally confounding one. I was trying to defend my
coworker’s view of drug courts to a faculty member, who asked the follow-
ing question, which I’m paraphrasing here: “While the courts’ goals are
honorable, wouldn’t it be better to spend the money on improving our
decaying schools, building affordable housing, and increasing the number of
jobs?” In other words, we should be addressing the social problems that
policy makers acknowledged were often the root causes for the crimes com-
mitted by the offenders entering these specialized courts, instead of focusing
on those individuals to change their behaviors.
Those two questions explain the impetus for this book—how can we
understand drug courts from both the practical policy view and the broader
sociological perspective? How can I straddle the lines between the two
audiences without forsaking the analysis? It means that I need to question the
ideological premises of drug courts of accountability and therapeutic jurispru-
dence without accepting them at face value. Yet, at the same time, I do not
want to reduce drug courts to being Orwellian expansions of social control
over docile bodies of drug offenders without also raising the possible practical
value in such courts. In short, I have attempted to validate the efforts of the
vii
viii Preface and Acknowledgments
drug court staff members, who are tirelessly dedicated to “doing good,” while
also questioning the iatrogenic effect that their efforts can produce.
My hope is that policy makers will come away from this book with a
newfound perspective about the unintended consequences of these courts and
the courage not to jump on board any reform train that appears to work. I
equally hope that academics will see how debunking policy reforms is not a
helpful approach to rectifying the social inequalities created by the contem-
porary justice system.
Over the years, many people have helped me develop and think through
the ideas presented in this book. First and foremost, my mentor since graduate
school, Robert Emerson, has been unswerving in his support and willingness to
read draft after draft. Working with him has been a privilege, as it has taught me
how to be a better ethnographer and scholar. He pushed me to push myself, to
constantly question the validity of my claims and the ever important connec-
tion to the data. The late Melvin Pollner also provided invaluable guidance
during the dissertation phase of this project. I fondly remember our long con-
versations about the theoretical implications of my work, bolstered with a
healthy dose of humor and laughter. I also want to thank my fellow graduate
students, specifically Sal Zerilli and Julie Peggar, in the social control working
group that helped move the dissertation writing along. Finally, my dear friends
and colleagues, Alexes Harris, Nikki Jones, Carla Shedd, and L’Heureux Lewis,
read later versions of the manuscript as it evolved from the dissertation stage.
I could not have finished this manuscript without the wonderful support of
the Ohio State University Crime and Justice Summer Research Institute. My
time there gave me an extra push at the final stage when all I wanted to do was
throw the manuscript in a drawer. Special thanks to Laurie Krivo, Ruth Peterson,
Steve Lopez, Aaron Kupchik, and the other participants in the 2009 SRI cohort.
I’m forever grateful to Marlie Wasserman and Peter Mickulas at Rutgers
University Press for their immediate enthusiasm and support for the book, as
well as the anonymous reviewers who provided wonderfully detailed feed-
back on the manuscript. Lastly, Tori-Ann Haywood provided much-needed
research assistance in the last phases of the writing.
Chapter 5 is reprinted with permission from Law and Society Review 40,
no. 4 (2006): 931–962. Excerpts from chapter 7 appeared in an article in Law
and Social Inquiry34, no. 3 (2009): 569–602. Chapter 6 was prepared with the
assistance of a grant from the PSC-CUNY program. The American Socio-
logical Association Minority Fellowship Program and the National Science
Foundation also supported this work.
Finally, this book could not have been written without the kindness and
generosity of the juvenile drug court staff and the youth participants and their
families who let me into their lives at the court, in their homes, and in their
communities. I am eternally indebted to them for allowing me the opportu-
nity to be part of their world, at least for a little while.
Discretionary Justice