Five Questions for Jeffrey A. Butts
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The number of youth involved in juvenile drug courts is small compared with the more than one million cases handled each year by traditional juvenile courts. But the programs are spreading rapidly and changing the way practitioners and policymakers address the challenge of adolescent drug use. That said, juvenile drug courts became popular long before researchers could demonstrate that they worked. 1. How do juvenile drug courts compare with adult drug courts? Juvenile drug courts adopted their operating styles and intervention techniques from adult drug courts. But they differ from adult drug courts in that they're dealing with kids. So, rather than just providing treatment, they have to provide treatment to young people who are probably still living with their parents, still attending school, and probably not working full-time. Don't forget that the kids involved with juvenile drug courts are adolescents. They are still developing their own sense of themselves, who their friends are, and athletics are more important for them than they would be for an adult. So activities and programs have to differ quite a bit from those for adults. 2. Juvenile drug courts do not follow a national model; rather, they're locally developed. Does this pose a problem? Yes and no. It's a problem because juvenile drug courts get very little guidance from either federal or state policymakers or professional organizations. The details of how to run a juvenile drug court are left up to each jurisdiction, and the programs vary because of that. In some cases, that variation can be good because it means the program is responding to local circumstances. It can be bad, however, if experimentation is uncontrolled and not adequately measured or tracked. No one would really know which programs are best. Some of the more interesting program ideas, however, come from local jurisdictions. As part of the work for this book, we looked at juvenile drug courts in New Mexico, Montana, Florida, Ohio, South Carolina, and New Jersey. Each differed from the rest. They all had different styles, even different clients. The juvenile drug court judge in Missoula, Montana happens to own a llama ranch, and he made his animals available to the program to do what is basically pet therapy. The kids got the opportunity to visit the ranch and get to know a llama, to take care of a llama. Each kid formed an attachment to one animal. This way, the drug court could work on issues such as responsibility, relationships, and consistency. One kid actually requested that his llama attend his drug court graduation ceremony. The local papers took photos. The press, of course, treated it somewhat humorously. But that kid obviously benefited from the experience. 3. What is the potential downside of juvenile drug courts? It's a tricky matter to decide who should or shouldn't be sent to juvenile drug court. In our society, anyone who uses an illegal drug is by definition engaging in behavior that the community scorns. How do we decide if that behavior is so bad that the youth should be coerced into treatment rather than merely offered assistance? With adolescents, we are always more likely to use coercion, and because of that, the threshold can be a bit lower. One way we decide whether drugs are a problem for somebody is when drugs begin to disrupt that person's ability to fulfill obligations at school, at work, and at home. But, almost by definition, an adolescent is someone who avoids responsibility! If we see someone being irresponsible and then, and at the same time, we hear that the person is a marijuana smoker, we put two and two together and call it a drug problem. But sometimes it could be a normal adolescent who is fooling around with marijuana, which half of all kids do by age 18, after all. We have to be very careful about dragging a kid into the legal system for drug "problems" as opposed to drug offenses. Someone caught selling drugs three times is one thing. A kid caught for weekend drinking and possession of pot is another. Once you have been to a court, there's an official record showing you broke the law. Your neighbors know it. The school principal knows it. Your friends know it. Pretty soon, you have a reputation as a bad kid. Sometimes kids learn to enjoy that reputation. So, we actually may be helping them solidify their reputation as tough guys or bad girls. Young people having trouble in school—they're not being recognized for academic success, they're not athletic—at least can be proud of being tough kids. But we shouldn't help them out by over-reacting. 4. Explain the Urban Institute's framework for evaluating juvenile drug courts. There's a concept known as the "black box." It means that sometimes we don't know what's going on inside a social program. Clients are referred, they're put through a process, and they come out the other end. Evaluators track them to see if they're better. If they're better, everyone is happy. But we don't learn anything unless we open up that black box and figure out what happened inside. The black box problem plagues the juvenile drug court field. If a researcher reports that a juvenile drug court is associated with a 20-percent decline in recidivism, that's great, but we don't know why. It could be the judge's personality. It could be the courtroom setting. It could be the court's use of incentives and rewards for good behavior. We don't know what made the change, so we learn nothing about how to run new programs. The Urban Institute framework opens up the black box. It encourages evaluators to study the smaller components, such as organizational management and the use of court authority. It also parses those two components into smaller and smaller pieces. There are some studies going on for adult drug courts that break open the black box and measure pieces of it. This is not yet happening with the juvenile drug courts. 5. In your book, you and John Roman argue that an accreditation process could help establish more viable juvenile drug courts. How? Once we have enough solid research findings on key components of juvenile drug courts, we should move on to accreditation using proven models. Rather than every juvenile drug court in the country searching for an evaluator, basic questions about effectiveness could be answered at the national level. We could say, if you have parts 1, 2, and 3, or components A, B, and C, you should be effective, and we know this from research. Then, local programs could spend their limited resources on getting accredited. They could go to their local county board or their state legislature and say, "you should fund us because we are an accredited juvenile drug court program" — and that would really mean something. |
Jeffrey A. Butts