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Juvenile
Drugs Courts:
Funding Soars, but What Do We Know?
By
Jennifer Moore
It's
been 10 years since the nation's fledgling juvenile drug courts
began receiving federal funds to rehabilitate teen drug abusers.
But despite federal investments of more than $1 billion over
the past decade and an explosion in the number of such courts
to nearly 300 in 2003, little rigorous research has been conducted
on their effectiveness.
In a new report, Juvenile Drug Courts and Teen Substance Abuse
(Urban Institute Press, 2004), Urban Institute researchers
Jeffrey A. Butts and John Roman examine the history, mission,
operations and evaluation of juvenile drug courts to find
out what's known about their ability to reduce drug use and
recidivism.
In the mid-1990s - when arrest rates for juvenile drug violations
more than doubled - state and local jurisdictions began creating
juvenile drug courts (JDCs), based largely on the anecdotal
success of adult drug courts established in the late 1980s.
Both adult and juvenile drug courts combine treatment with
close supervision and the leverage of judicial authority to
change the behavior of users.
Butts and Roman suggest that when federal drug court funds
became available to juvenile courts in 1995, some jurisdictions
saw an opportunity to provide increased resources to troubled
youth caught up in a juvenile justice system that had become
more punitive. "This was an earnest endeavor to get services
to kids," Roman says.
Since then, however, juvenile drug courts have evolved with
widely varying characteristics, largely through uncontrolled
innovations. "No one encourages them to think theoretically,"
Butts says. "They careen back and forth between ideas."
At they same time, the programs have been scrutinized mainly
by a "haphazard program of inadequate and potentially
redundant evaluations" that have failed to clearly define
their components, document their impact or prove their success,
the researchers write. "It doesn't take much to evaluate
a program" to the satisfaction of funders, Butts says.
"JDCs pretty much just have to check off a box that says,
'We've been evaluated.' "
But in a departure from the usual researchers' cry for more
research, Butts and Roman assert that less will produce more.
They argue that the current system requiring JDCs to arrange
for an evaluation at the conclusion of each three- to four-year
federal funding cycle produces limited data and provides little
evidence on whether and how the courts work. Like many youth
programs, the courts are asked to justify their continuation
by producing proof of positive results. For JDCs, the renewal
of their federal funding depends upon it.
"That's when the professor from the local university
is called in and presented with a shoebox full of data,"
Butts says. "The easiest thing to do is to compare recidivism
among youth who graduated from the drug court program versus
those who dropped out or terminated from the program. That's
why, when you look at these evaluations, you see something
like '90 percent of program graduates were arrest-free 12
months later.' Of course they are, because you've taken all
of the likely recidivists out of the equation."
The authors describe this type of impact evaluation as based
on a "black box" model, in which drug use and arrest
rates are measured before, during and after the offender passes
through the "black box" of drug court. Such limited
evaluations create myriad problems. Most lack a basic cause-and-effect
hypothesis of how involvement in drug court might affect behavior.
Most are designed to be nonexperimental or weakly quasi-experimental
- that is, they don't randomly assign participants to treatment
and control groups, thus limiting their ability to minimize
the effects of unobserved factors (like the characteristics
of participants) on outcomes. Finally, "black box"
evaluations fail to break the processes of the court into
components that can be observed and studied individually.
Unfortunately, as many youth workers well know, the thoroughness
of evaluations is often sacrificed to accommodate time and
financial constraints. In an effort to fill the void of scientifically
based research, several practitioner and research groups,
including the National Drug Court Institute and the RAND Corp.,
have compiled best-practice guidelines that list operational
features considered by some as key to the success of JDCs.
These may help courts that are starting from scratch, but
don't provide enough evidence upon which to build a conceptual
framework for effective programs.
In their study, Butts and Roman suggest a framework to direct
researchers' attention to the important ingredients of program
operations, encourage the formulation and testing of viable
hypotheses, and suggest useful measurement approaches and
data collection techniques.
They conclude that federal money could best be spent on targeted
efforts to establish evidence-based operational principles
for JDCs through the use of these or similar frameworks, and
that a system of independent accreditation based on the implementation
of those principles might become the basis for funding renewal.
"The danger in that," Butts says, "is that
people will buy into the concept of accreditation instead
of evaluation, or that the accreditation process will become
politicized."
Steven Belenko, a senior scientist at the Treatment Research
Institute at the University of Pennsylvania and an advisory
committee member of the National Evaluation of Juvenile Drug
Courts, says most JDCs aren't ready for accreditation. "Many
have 10 to 15 clients. Almost none have 100 clients, which
is the minimum you need to do a decent evaluation," he
says.
Belenko agrees that the next step is to fund a small number
of JDC programs to be tested by a rigorous experimental design.
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