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The notion that more information improves our lives has become pervasive in our everyday life. Specific to crime, we promote the idea of increased protection from new surveillance technologies (e.g. mandatory drug testing/DNA testing, video surveillance, biometric systems) to detect any kind of deviance (e.g. drug use, criminal activity, terrorism). Yet many do not question the unintended consequences of such intensive information gathering efforts. In response, the paper looks at the types and uses of information found in a southern California juvenile drug court. Diverting substance-abusing youths into drug treatment instead of long-term placement, the juvenile drug court relies on legal authority and coercion to induce youths to participate in treatment programs intended to change their "deviant" ways into more morally acceptable forms of behavior. Based on 13 months of ethnographic fieldwork, this paper uses a "law in action" approach (Manzo and Travers 1998) to consider how drug court staff use information to make decisions about offenders' behavior and progress in the program. This paper does not presume more information will facilitate or improve decision-making. Rather, it will show the ways in which information is questionable, incomplete or delayed and the implications for the staff's decision-making process. In this way, the paper specifically considers information to be a resource, versus a fact, that is selectively chosen, presented and interpreted by staff in its decision-making process. The paper argues these "flaws" are reflective of the local institutional context in which the information is used. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on a study that evaluates whether the size of place influences the outcomes of a drug court. Basically the goal of a drug court is not to punish drug offenders for their crime but to help them break their addiction from drugs. According to a recent report from General Accounting Office of the United States, there are 791 drug courts nationwide, all loosely based on the Miami, Florida model and the Department of Justice's "ten key components" of drug courts. But despite this widespread popular Miami drug court model, evaluations of drug courts have shown inconsistent results as to their effectiveness. This article seeks to investigate some of the broader structural factors regarding the effectiveness of drug courts.

The article discusses the ways in which staff interprets drug testing collection procedures, type of drug tests used and laboratory results as evidence of the youth being out of compliance in the U.S. It also presents an ethnographic case study of how drug tests are used in a juvenile drug court in southern California that diverts juvenile felony offenders with substance abuse problems into drug treatment instead of long-term custody. The court sessions involve both the team meeting where staff reviews the youth's progress and decide possible sanctions or rewards for the youth, as well as the actual court hearing with the youth participants and their families.

Social scientists analyzing computer-mediated communication have taken two broad approaches: either focusing on communication technology's impact on social relations (e.g. changing how people do business, consume products, etc), or on the impact of social relations on communication technology (e.g. 'digital divide'). Scholars working in this area commonly assume that communication technologies have decentered face-to-face interaction in social and organizational life. Yet, these same scholars tend to treat face-to-face interaction as the underlying paradigm of interaction for the communication processes they study. Taking up these issues, this paper argues that sociologists of communication technologies implicitly adopt one or another version of face-to-face interaction as an analytic referent against which the distinctive qualities of computer mediated communication may be compared, contrasted and illuminated, therein treating a main topic of their analysis as an analytical resource. Thus, despite their reliance on face-to- face interaction as a foundational reference point for analyses of computer mediated communication, scholars skirt the issue of what face-to-face interaction uniquely provides in communication processes. This paper contributes to the research on computer-mediated communication processes in three ways: (1) grounded in social interactionist theory, it provides an understanding of what face-to-face interaction uniquely provides in communication processes, (2) it offers a theoretical baseline researchers can use to make comparisons between face-to-face interaction and other communication media, and (3) it speculates on the analytical future of face-to-face interaction within the study of computer mediated communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Researchers have become increasingly dependent on collaborations to maintain their productivity. Much of the dramatic progress in the basic sciences has been driven by investigator initiated proposals and an entrepreneurial spirit. However, increasing specialization of individual laboratories works against a current drive towards understanding systems, especially for the biological sciences. Consequently, there is a tension between the growing importance of collaborative efforts and the practical and structural challenges in establishing and managing such collaborations in the quest to understand our world. While there is a growing body of research on the co-production of knowledge in collaborative settings, little is known about how that process happens in collaborations established and maintained through virtual organizations. Virtual organizations (VO) can facilitate scientific work across time and space but do not eradicate the social aspects (e.g. trust, institutional limitations, laboratory cultures) to scientific knowledge production. In this paper, we study new generations of knowledge production in one scientific discipline - biology - that has not relied on VOs as much as other scientific fields. We are especially interested in how the production of knowledge in biology changes as scientists move from traditional face-to-face interactions to virtual collaborations. How does that affect the ways in which biologists craft interpretations of scientific findings? In particular, this paper investigates aspects of scientific work that are still based on face-to-face interactions and pre-existing relationships. It also addresses how the sharing of data, resources and workflow, as promoted by the VO, are shaped by those social factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many critics of the current incarceral state point to new initiatives such as therapeutic jurisprudence as possible reforms. Initially conceptualized by Wexler and Winick (1991, 2003) for mental health law, therapeutic jurisprudence encourages legal practitioners to help offenders address issues such as mental illness, drug use, unemployment and homelessness instead of processing them simply in terms of the legal offense. This paper considers these initiatives and how they represent a new type of "self-driven" penal policy, in which offenders' case outcomes are based on their own efforts/motivation to complete treatment-oriented diversion programs, rather than on traditional legal categories of guilt and innocence. This paper also discusses how, in the era of mass incarceration, offenders have to constantly work to prove they are worthy of their freedom, even while out in the community and in seemingly "helpful" diversion programs designed to keep them out of jail/prison. Finally, this paper addresses how these initiatives, which many applaud as being opposite of incarceration, might instead represent extensions of the incarceral state. That is, they extend the scope of surveillance to more groups of offenders and increase the likelihood of the offenders ultimately going to prison for failing these diversion programs. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the growing research on drug courts, little has been done in terms of how the clients' race/ethnicity, gender and neighborhood may influence their perceptions of these courts and how those perceptions affect their progress. This paper focuses on how youths and their families' perceptions of a juvenile drug court in southern California affect their interactions with the staff and levels of "compliance" in this court. Based on 48 interviews with youths and their families, the paper will address their perceptions of the court's intensive monitoring and decision-making process. It also will explore if the youth's race, gender and family structure shape their perceptions. Furthermore, given the court is a county-wide model and features three sub-courts based on the youths' neighborhoods, the paper will explore potential neighborhood differences among youths and their families' perceptions. For example, do youths who live in more centralized urban neighborhoods perceive the staff supervision differently than youths living in more remote areas where staff does not check on youths as often? In sum, this paper seeks to inform our understanding on client and family engagement in the court, by illustrating the moments when and the reasons why they engage or disengage from the court process. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper outlines the institutional careers that youth clients take in a juvenile drug court in southern California and how the court's organizational features influence those various pathways. By institutional careers, the paper refers to youth's short- and long-term fates in the court. Based on 12 months of participant observation of staff meetings, court hearings, and staff field-based supervision of youth in their schools, homes and drug treatment programs, the paper focuses on two distinctive organizational features that frame the staff's decision-making processes, which in turn, influence the youth's institutional careers. First, the court operates within a complex institutional environment of legal and therapeutic practitioners who engage in a detailed "collaborative" decision-making process about youth's "treatment." Secondly, the coordinated involvement of multiple institutions allows for close and intensive routine supervision of youth, with information provided on youth's behavior and problems in family, community, school and drug-treatment program contexts. In contrast to classic probation supervision that keyed on episodic summaries of youth behavior and new violations of the law, supervision in juvenile drug courts comes to center on staff's routine assessments of youth's daily behavior within the courts' locally defined notions of "compliance" and "non-compliance." The paper argues that it is primarily these two organizational features that shape youth's institutional careers, more so than youth's individual behaviors per se. With this organizational perspective, the paper builds on current research on drug courts by examining "therapeutic jurisprudence in action. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite various attempts to standardize case processing (e.g. mandatory minimums, determinate sentencing) in the U.S. justice system, racial disparities continue to exist as minority youth and adults face harsher punishments and higher rates of incarceration than white defendants. This paper will consider if and how racial differences appear in a problem-solving court by taking an ethnographic look at staff decision-making practices of youth compliance at a juvenile drug court in southern California. This paper looks specifically at how juvenile drug court staffs use of mental health diagnoses could possibly serve as a proxy for differential treatment based on a youths race. Given that a possible mental disorder serves many purposes to absolve youth of their bad behavior and to figure out new ways to work with the youth this racial discrepancy merits further attention. The paper addresses two questions: when and for what reasons do staff members invoke (possible) mental disorder in their decision-making process about the youths compliance? How do those reasons relate to the youths race, if at all? As staff does not openly recognize racial differences in their discussions of the youths behavior, this paper instead will discuss the situations in which staff raise the possibility of mental illness and determine if there are variations in their decisions based on the youths race. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents findings from an ethnographic project on staff decision-making practices in a juvenile drug court in southern California. This paper will focus on one aspect of the project: staff strategies in decision-making. The paper specifically discusses how staff presents and discusses information about youth during their pre-court hearing meetings. In these meetings, the staff must decide by consensus whether the youth is compliant with the program and if not, what corresponding sanction should be imposed. This paper will trace how staff members try to transform a specific bad action committed by the youth into a significant or irrelevant event that merits a court response (or not). This paper is based on 13 months of participant observation of staff meetings, court hearings, and staff field-based work as they check on youth in their schools, homes and drug treatment programs. The larger project looks at how staff gathers information and makes decisions about youth participants and how youth and their parents try to influence and shape that decision-making process. In short, the objective of the project is to discern variations in a drug court clients institutional career and to show how the different actors (e.g. staff, youth, parents) all have a role in creating and shaping those variations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]