Institutional Careers in a Juvenile Drug Court.

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 ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]