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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 ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]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]