Discretionary Justice: Looking Inside a Juvenile Drug Court

6. It's Not Just His Probation, It's Mine: Parental Involvement in the Drug Court

Chapter 6 It’s Not Just His Probation, It’s Mine: Parental Involvement in the Drug Court In negotiating the extent and severity of youths’ noncompliant behaviors when deciding to hold youths accountable, the juvenile drug court staff commonly encountered the following dilemma: what to do when family members prevent their own children from staying in compliance. For example, staff expected families to help youths stay in compliance with the court’s rules (e.g., make them go to school and treatment), but many parents occasionally asked their children stay home to babysit their younger siblings instead. While staff debated who to hold responsible in those situations—the parents or the youths—legally it could only punish the youths. Families are also expected to inform staff about youths’ noncompliant actions. The staff asked parents to be its “eyes and ears” for additional supervision. Judge O’Reilly often told parents in the orientation for new youth participants, “we can’t watch them twenty-four hours, and you see them every day.”1 However, most parents did not inform, or only selectively informed, the staff about their youths’ noncompliance; alternatively, other parents gave information that the staff saw as irrelevant. Family involvement, therefore, can directly impact the staff’s sense of a youth’s accountability, either in the parents’ expectations for the youth that ran counter to those of the court or in the parents’ lack of communication with the staff about the youth’s noncompliance. Both ways limit the staff ’s ability to assess the youths’ noncompliance and to hold them accountable. By extension, parental involvement (or lack thereof) affected the staff’s sense of a youth’s workability, or its strategy in getting the youth to adhere to the court’s rules. The irony here is that staff told parents and legal guardians that they were equal members of the team and that their input in the decision-making process was always welcomed. Yet, many parents did not feel an equal partnership existed. Consider the following typical staff-parental interaction 99 in a north court hearing compared to the parents’ perspectives of the same hearing: Judge Samuels: Rita, the reports are that you are doing very well. . . . [To the mother] How is Rita doing at home? Mother: She is doing great. Judge Samuels always asks parents how their youth is doing at home in front of the entire group of drug court youths and parents. Some parents see this routinized questioning as insincere, while others see it as limiting their willingness to speak up, especially if their comments contradict the judge’s assessment . Ben’s mother, fifty-two and white, says, “After he’s [Judge Samuels] praised him for doing so well in school or whatever, and then to really say the truth, ‘No, he’s not doing that great at home’ . . . everybody hears it, I think it’s a little intimidating . . . I just say, ‘I’m working on it,’ ’cause he isn’t doing that great at home.” While the staff may feel that it provides opportunities for parents to express themselves, these opportunities may not be as inviting or open as it imagined. When the staff asks for what parents perceive to be superficial mechanical responses, parents might get the sense that their input is not really wanted. Erving Goffman’s ideas in “Insanity of Place” (1969), can help illuminate the variations in parents’ responses to staff. Goffman describes how families typically try to adhere to the “family information rule” of not telling others outside the family about their particular family dysfunction. However, when a family member is too disruptive to the family’s “internal economy,” or that family’s own ways of doing things, the family will tell others outside the family , in the “external economy,” to control the problematic family member. In this light, parental involvement in the court could be understood as instances when they want help getting their youth back in line with their internal economy. If they don’t need that help, parents might not be as likely to align with the staff. Yet at the same time, families in the juvenile drug court face another dilemma. Typically, families have complete authority over their internal economy, deciding what constitutes a problem in their family and when to share that problem with others. However, the drug court’s jurisdiction over the youths usurps that parental authority, and families must cede that discretion to the staff, who tells them when and how to break the...