NCJ Number
208175
Editor(s)
Jeffrey A. Butts,
John Roman
Date Published
2004
Length
389 pages
Annotation
The eight chapters of this book highlight the most important factors in determining the effectiveness of juvenile drug courts, and they encourage future evaluation researchers to formulate and test explicit hypotheses that involve those factors.
Abstract
Most of the material was produced for the National Evaluation of Juvenile Drug Courts (NEJDC) project of the Urban Institute. This project was designed to facilitate future evaluation research on juvenile drug courts and to encourage policymakers and practitioners to examine the impact and effectiveness of the juvenile drug court process. The first paper introduces the key concepts of drug courts, with attention to the emergence of juvenile drug courts (JDC's). The second chapter describes the proliferation of drug courts during the 1990's, noting that it was an evolution that integrated two existing enterprises, i.e., the drug treatment enterprise of social services agencies and the drug law enforcement enterprise of the justice system. This is followed by a chapter that reviews the practices and policies of juvenile drug courts, with attention to how the components of six JDC's differ. Another chapter examines the results of drug court evaluations and the sparseness of available research that would link drug court components to participant outcomes. The next chapter critiques JDC screening policies, noting that the scope of juvenile illegal drug use is too great to anticipate including every case of such drug use in the JDC system. The sixth chapter reviews diagnostic instruments used by practitioners to determine when juveniles have drug problems that require drug court intervention, followed by a chapter that presents a conceptual framework that will facilitate evaluation designs that relate program outcomes to specific program components and procedures. The concluding chapter proposes a plan of juvenile drug court evaluations that will lead to the development of an accreditation system for JDC's. Chapter references, appended listing of drug court evaluation literature for 1993-2004, and a subject index