Information Overload: Increased Clarity or Chaos? Informational Gathering and Uses in a Juvenile Drug Court.

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]