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128 Chapter 7 Youth Trajectories in the Court Staff works with youths for a long time, rarely giving up on them. For example, Claire, a seventeen-year-old white female in the east court, recently turned herself in after being on the run for six of the seven months that she has been in the court. In discussing her case during a staff meeting, Jerry, a drug counselor, suspects Claire, who is now in juvenile hall, is coming down from methamphetamine use. Weber, the judge, responds that while Claire has “pretty much been AWOL,” she hopes Claire will “jump on board soon.” On the one hand, the fact that the staff does not terminate Claire seems a hopeful decision. On the other hand, the staff ’s persistence could simply drag out the inevitable, leading to a worse fate for the youth. For example, one youth asked to be let out of drug court from the beginning, but the staff insisted on working with him for almost a year, using every normal remedy (court sanction) multiple times before finally terminating him from drug court. The staff ’s prolonged effort stems from the notion that staff does not know in advance what normal remedy will work for a particular youth at different points. The questions become “How does staff figure out what works for which youth? In what instances and when should staff give up on a youth?” Both of these questions need to be asked to understand how final case outcomes are determined in the court. The answers to these questions can be found by considering the cumulative impact of staff ’s weekly decisions about youth noncompliance on the youth’s workability. Workability refers to the staff ’s ideas of how to motivate the youth to be able to meet the drug court’s expectations and to learn individual accountability. This is an ever evolving process. That is, if the youth does not respond in the expected fashion to a normal remedy, the staff might revise its sense of the youth’s workability and try another normal remedy for the next instance of noncompliance. If the youth responds in the expected fashion, the staff might continue along the sequence of normal remedies associated the initial workability type. So, how the staff decides to work with the youth, when the staff decides to change gears in its approach, or when the staff starts giving up on working with the youth all influence how a youth makes progress in the court. Youth Trajectories in the Court 129 There are two workability types that shape youths’ final outcomes in the court–common and compromised. The common workability types all share one key feature: they are based on the staff ’s continued belief that youths can be held accountable for their actions. This belief is sustained by seeing if the normal remedies have some effect on the youth. Most youths fall into the first two types of the common workability category: drug and corrective oriented . Compromised workabilities start off much in the same way as the common types but veer off in another direction. This occurs because none of the normal remedies to youths’ noncompliance works in the expected fashion . Staff begins to see youths in these types as unable to take responsibility for their actions. Focusing on workability types recognizes the practical reality that the staff uses many ways to work with youths. Staff members have differing views about the most effective way to work with the youths. Sarah, a probation officer, remarked generally that “the one grand pattern is that they don’t go through without relapse.” In contrast, Bill, a drug counselor, describes three types of youths in the court: There is the kind of kid that is going to breeze through drug court, is not going to have a relapse. Quite often those kids are the ones that we help the least because they have not struggled at all . . . they just never had a problem with drugs to begin with, and they just were like situational . They got in situations that caused them to become involved in drug court. . . . The other kind is the kid that is, got a good, good disease. . . . This is the typical kid. And this is the kid that we probably have the most success with is the kid that struggles in the beginning multiple times. You know, it may take eight, half a year of incarceration, or whatever, but multiple times he relapses. We come back...

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