What Works in Juvenile Drug Courts: Emerging Research

When I was at the Joint Meeting on Adolescent Treatment Effectiveness (JMATE) in Washington D.C. in December, I caught up with John Roman, Ph.D., Senior Fellow at The Urban Institute, just before he gave a fantastic presentation on emerging research on juvenile drug courts.  Click on the video above to hear what John has to say. Since the video sound is not ideal, I've also provided a transcript, below:

Q: How can juvenile drug courts out in the community make themselves more effective?
John: I think the two things juvenile drug courts should focus on at this moment in time are:
(1) Thinking really carefully about who you want to get into your court. [That means] thinking about the scale of the problem in your community that you have the capacity to take on, thinking about what services you have available to you, and thinking about the needs – particularly the level of drug and alcohol involvement among youth, and thinking about how more and more people have to be involved in the system.
If you have limited capacity, it makes sense to focus more broadly on a population that maybe has less serious problems; if you have lots of capacity, you can really focus. The more you can focus on youth who have real, serious problems, the better the benefit for the community.
But I think a lot of juvenile drug courts don't think a lot about who they're getting through the front door, they just take whoever comes to them, and they're maybe not as set up to deal with that as they might be.
(2) The other thing I would say about a juvenile drug court is to think really carefully about your theoretical orientation. What is it about your program that you believe causes kids to desist from drug use? Do you believe in the deterrence model, where it's really about the sanctions and rewards? Or do you believe in the therapeutic jurisprudence model, which is really about a fair and open process? What's your orientation? That really needs to pervade every aspect of what you do, and I think a lot of courts act a lot more ad hoc. 

 
Q: So, does it matter which model you use?
John: That's a great question. I don't think we know, yet. 
There's emerging evidence from adult drug courts that, at least for adults, that it's this interaction with the judge that is absolutely crucial. And that leads us toward an orientation toward procedural justice, with a maybe little less focus on deterrence, and even a little less focus on the treatment.
It means having a judge who listens, who cares --  and drawing from the juvenile research, being someone whom juveniles believe understands the problems of somebody their age. And that can be a real big divide, in the juvenile drug court world. But as long as you really … I don't know if deterrence is better than procedural justice, but I do know that doing one model carefully, versus doing a mix, and some ad hoc stuff – it's always better to do one orientation and stick to it – you're much more likely to have good outcomes than if you're just mixing and matching.
 
Q: Can you share with us two new developments from the juvenile drug court research?
John: Well that's one, and that's really the critical one. I mean, this message that the judge matters. We've talked about charismatic leadership forever, but what really talking about now is, how the judge interacts with the youth. That the youth thinks that the judge – believes that the judge is interested in their case, knows that the facts of their life, is thinking about the best ways to move them forward as a person, and not just as a case. You can have procedural justice, and you can have deterrence, you can have all these sort of theoretical orientations, but nothing matters more than that one-on-one interaction with the judge.
The other thing that's emerging out of the juvenile drug court literature that I think is really interesting is that, what happens in court --- so, this is one of the 16 key strategies [for juvenile drug courts], and there's three addendum points on it, you know, "juveniles are different from adults," and the third one is that family matters a lot, right?
And there's emerging research that suggests that if you have problems at home that are really severe -- that your problems at home are almost intractable -- the juvenile drug court can't move you along. So, if you have mom's engaged in prostitution, or drug-dealing, if there are different things going on at home, where you know the kid can't sleep, or the kid's learning all these bad behaviors not getting good nutrition -- if these basic elements of adolescent development aren't met, there's almost nothing that a juvenile drug court can do. So really identifying and engaging those "worst" parents would be my recommendation for the most important thing that juvenile drug courts can do. 
 
Q: So, essentially, having supplemental services that engage the whole family, therapy, or other services that are needed.
John: Therapy, services, and a willingness to work to take the child out of this environment. I think we're all very, very reluctant to do that, and when you're dealing with kids in the juvenile justice system who get to the juvenile justice, you're dealing with some kids with serious issues, and yet it's only a tiny fraction of these kids that have this fractious home life that's so bad they just can't escape it. And a willingness to sort of go "all-in" to protect kids from that environment is the most important thing I think drug courts can do. 

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