Doctoral Dissertation Research: Juvenile Drug Courts: An Ethnographic View of the Interagency Collaboration and Client Perceptions of the Court Intervention

青少年毒品法庭是最近许多改变青少年司法系统如何在家庭和社区的大背景下看待青少年的尝试之一。青少年毒品法庭以20世纪80年代末在美国建立的成人毒品法庭为基础，将有药物滥用问题的青少年罪犯转移到药物治疗中，而不是传统的缓刑。由于青少年毒品法庭最近才进入青少年司法领域，因此对其进行的实证研究很少。这一研究空白留下了许多关于这些法院的基本运作和决策过程特征的未解问题，例如：在这些机构间治疗方案的日常运作中出现了什么样的紧张和冲突？在这些项目中，自由裁量决策的关键点是什么？哪些社区和组织因素会影响决策时刻和结果？随着时间的推移，这个项目对青少年客户的影响是什么？为了回答这些问题，该项目将着眼于青年客户的机构职业生涯——客户在项目中所经历的阶段以及在不同时间点可获得的一系列结果。该项目将使用人种学的定性方法（参与者观察和访谈）和对话分析，对一个青少年毒品法庭项目中的30名青少年进行为期12个月的跟踪调查，以获得对这一过程的自然描述。简而言之，该项目将为每个客户创建机构“路线图”，以查看是否有相似之处，不一致或偶然事件，标志着不同客户的关键决策和节点。该项目的目标是双重的：首先是剖析法院的决策过程，确定该过程中涉及的因素，并检测客户机构职业之间的变化。第二是要特别关注青年客户及其父母如何成为这一过程的消费者，以及他们试图影响员工决策过程的方式。

The juvenile drug court is one of many recent attempts to change how the juvenile justice system considers the youth within the greater context of his family and community. Based on adult drug courts that started in the United States in the late 1980s, a juvenile drug court diverts juvenile offenders with substance abuse problems into drug treatment instead of traditional probation. Very little empirical research has been done on juvenile drug courts due their recent entry on the juvenile justice scene. This gap in research leaves unanswered many questions about the basic operation and decision-making processes characteristic of these courts such as: what kinds of tensions and conflict arise in the routine functioning of such inter-agency treatment programs? What are the key points of discretionary decision-making in these programs? What community and organizational factors influence the decision junctures and outcomes? What is the impact of the program on youth clients over time? To answer those questions, this project will look at the youth clients' institutional careers -- the stages a client moves through within a program and the array of outcomes available at various points in time. The project will use qualitative methods of ethnography (participant observation and interviews) and conversation analysis, following 30 youth in a juvenile drug court program for 12 months to obtain a naturalistic account of the process. In short, the project will create institutional "road maps" of each client to see if there are parallels, inconsistencies or contingencies marking critical decisions and junctures for different clients. The project objective is twofold: the first is to dissect the court's decision-making process, identifying the factors involved in that process and detecting variations among clients' institutional careers. The second is to pay particular attention to how youth clients and their parents become consumers of this process and the ways in which they try to shape the staff's decision-making process.