Abstract
Leslie Paik, Discretionary Justice: Looking inside a Juvenile Drug Court, Rutgers University Press: New Brunswick, NJ, 2011; 272 pp.: 9780813550077, $64.80 (cloth), $ 23.30 (pbk)
Juvenile drug arrests in the United States soared in the early 1990s, much as they did for adults. In the adult population, drug arrests rose even though drug use was declining or holding stable, a fact that has become part and parcel to contemporary critiques of the war on crime. Juvenile drug use was, however, on the rise in the early 1990s and that – combined with an earlier shift toward drug arrests involving cocaine and heroin, and the practical problems of large caseloads and expanding correctional populations – was the motivation for the courts to think about young drug offenders differently. Special drug courts had already been established for adults in the late 1980s, and in the late 1990s the idea caught on for juveniles. As Leslie Paik describes in her book Discretionary Justice, juvenile drug courts were intended as ‘alternatives to incarceration for drug offenders’ (p. 1). They promised therapeutic treatment and supervision for juvenile drug offenders within their community, and therefore offered a diversion from correctional custody. In her work Leslie Paik questions whether juvenile drug courts live up to their ideal as a true alternative to totalizing correctional control.
Based on 15 months of ethnographic observations in three California juvenile drug courts and a collection of over 100 interviews, Paik finds that juvenile drug courts function as a ‘total institution’ (p. 7). In supervising offenders, juvenile drug courts employ a system of surveillance so invasive that juveniles get caught in a prison-like model of community supervision. As in Bentham’s Panopticon, Paik argues, juvenile drug court clients are subject to a meticulous scrutiny that engages punitive mechanisms for mundane behaviors and causes juveniles to navigate drug courts as social control institutions behind the veil of therapeutic jurisprudence.
With the intent of helping juvenile drug offenders address their substance abuse problems, drug courts outline a treatment plan and establish clear guidelines for meeting treatment goals. Because there are sanctions for offenders who fail to meet expectations, the ideals of therapeutic jurisprudence can quickly give way to the traditions of social control and punishment. Paik observes that drug court staff (probation officers, drug counselors, police officers, attorneys, therapists, and judges) are in charge of determining the extent of their clients’ noncompliance and assessing their ultimate ‘workability’ within the drug court program. Assessments are always shaped by the youth’s actions and the court’s potential to gain client compliance given resources at the court’s disposal at any particular time. Evaluations are also constructed within broader contexts that take into account youth behaviors extending far beyond the realm of substance abuse to include their school and home lives. Consequently, Paik argues, ‘staff could assess youths as noncompliant for … behaviors [that] are not criminal outside of the drug court … [and] face criminal-like sanctions like short-term stays in juvenile hall’ (p. 4). Paik goes so far as to say that an assessment of noncompliance could stem from ‘a variety of trivial actions’ (p. 4). She concludes that drug courts specifically and therapeutic jurisprudences generally offer new opportunities for surveillance and criminalization within the social control paradigm.
Discretionary Justice owes its title in large part to Paik’s observation that the ‘facts’ of drug use are not the determining factors in staff assessments of youth compliance; rather, staff understand drug use as part of a larger story they tell about each youth based on their background, character and affiliations, which leaves plenty of room for staff interpretation. Discretionary justice of this sort has been touted as a way of taking large socio-structural contexts into account and avoiding the vacuum created by decontextualized processing, as is required in mandatory sentencing, but Paik shows the downsides of such an approach. She reveals how drug court staff use their discretion in making assessments that are socially constructed. A cautionary tale emerges in Paik’s chapter on drug testing – a central example of the drug court’s surveillance apparatus – where she documents that staff evaluations of drug test results were ‘interpretive work’ (p. 77). For example, positive drug tests were sometimes interpreted as an indication of drug use and at other times an indication of abstinence. The results are situated in what the staff believe they know about the broader pattern of a client’s substance abuse and what they know about the drug testing program, which can produce false positives and false negatives. Given that staff’s interpretive work and decisions ‘appeared to vary by the youths’ race, gender and socioeconomic class’ (p. 4) and drug test outcomes are highly contingent upon character assessments, there is a significant opportunity for staff assessments to reproduce extant inequalities along the axes of race, class, and gender. Paik noted these specific inequalities in staff assessments of middle class white youth as ‘mentally ill’ and ‘wannabe gang members’, whereas Latino working class youths were labeled ‘manipulators’ and actual ‘gangsters’ (p. 5). The role of these social constructions in shaping discretionary judgments is worthy of investigation and might have been further elaborated upon in Paik’s book. Also, Paik does not point to the relevance of sexuality in these assessments, although it is clearly revealed in her data about young and sexually active men and women in the juvenile drug courts.
In taking her readers behind the scenes in three US juvenile drug courts, Paik offers a unique insider perspective on how staff evaluate youth compliance to their court ordered drug treatment plan and how staff assessments shape youth trajectories. Paik’s focus on adult staff is shaped by the context of her fieldwork. She primarily studied court hearings where cases were heard; team meetings where drug court staff made their determinations of youth compliance; and screening meetings where staff evaluated new clients. In selecting these sites for ethnographic observation, Paik admirably brought dimension to a world that is often hidden and left uncharted. To explore this territory, however, the author was required to make some methodological compromises. Namely, she was not allowed to tape record the screening meetings or the court sessions she attended. In explaining her decision to present the conversations from those meetings as data in long block quotes, Paik writes that she ‘wrote down the staff’s discussions as accurately as possible to get a sense of the naturally occurring decision-making process’ (p. 26). She explains further that the ‘staff’s conversations presented in this book are based on these written field notes, with most of the dialogue being literal transcriptions of the conversations’ (p. 26). I imagine that accuracy of the sort that Paik claims might be possible in the hands of a talented stenographer, but it is unclear whether Paik has this skill. Given the strength of the data collected and its currency in debates about therapeutic jurisprudence, there is a powerful incentive to bracket the constraints of Paik’s data collection method and accept her representation of the data as quotable, but ultimately this position might be uncomfortable for the ethnographers in her audience. For many other readers, however, Discretionary Justice is poised to provide a thoughtful set of insights on the machinations of a contemporary juvenile drug court.
Paik concludes her book with a nuanced assessment of juvenile drug courts in which she resists the opportunity afforded by her data to discredit drug courts altogether. She writes: I could easily conclude that we must completely reconsider having drug courts in the first place. However, drug courts do have the potential to help drug addicts stop using, to keep drug offenders in their communities instead of in jails, and to enable successful drug court clients to reintegrate more easily back into society. (p. 177)