Reinventing Justice: The American Drug Court Movement (review)

Reinventing Justice: The American Drug Court Movement. By James L. Nolan Jr. Princeton University Press, 2001. 254 pp. Cloth, $29.95.

James L. Nolan Jr.'s Reinventing Justice begins with descriptions that dramatically illustrate the nature of drug courts. Setting the stage for an overarching dramaturgical theme, Nolan likens drug courts to theater and testimony to storytelling and depicts the many ways in which actors in such courts actively promote the therapeutic ideal. For example, whereas emotions are typically discouraged in a court of law, emotions are encouraged, celebrated, and, indeed, viewed as evidence of the "true self" in drug courts. Furthermore, whereas other courts refer to "defendants," drug courts prefer the term clients and actively—even aggressively — encourage responsible and expansive self-development.

Nolan's book is a detailed and well-written account of drug courts and his method is well suited for the story he tells. Nolan conducted face-to-face and open-ended interviews with twenty-four judges in eleven states and the District of Columbia, attended national drug court conferences and mentoring court programs, and participated in the planning stages of one court. Using this rich ethnographic evidence, Nolan captures in detail the experience of the drug court, the trials of the clients, and the rationalizations of judges for their decisions.

All this stands well on its own, but Nolan's ambitions are broader. Nolan's central theoretical claim is that the rise of the drug court movement was made possible by a culture amenable to the court's therapeutic orientation. Because drug addiction is viewed as a disease rooted in more basic problems of the self, and because many traditional forms of justice for drug offenses are no longer effective, the therapeutic ideals of the drug court emerged as the preferred form of justice. Despite Nolan's reliance on a cultural explanation, however, he provides little evidence for the dominance of the therapeutic ideal in the mind of the public. Some public opinion data, in fact, tells a different story: General Social Survey data taken in the middle of Nolan's study (1996), for example, suggests that the public is more likely to see drug dependence as resulting from "bad character" than from other factors and that only a slim majority of Americans view drug dependence as a physical illness at all (see Link et al., American Journal of Public Health 89:1328-33).

The "culture" of beliefs about drug abuse, therefore, is more complex than is allowed for here and perhaps also less conducive to the seemingly singular rise of the somewhat peculiar drug court. Indeed, the dominance of the therapeutic ideal seems unlikely even in light of the evidence Nolan himself reports. If American culture was so disposed toward the therapeutic ideal, it is strange that drug court judges would be left defending their legitimacy so often and with such artfulness. Nolan describes at several points how drug courts are part of a larger social movement that self-consciously promotes itself among other legal professionals and the public as effective and entirely consistent with popular notions of justice.

While Nolan claims to prefer description and to make no assessments of the utility of drug courts, the book ends with a critique of the expanding purview of the therapeutic ideal in contemporary criminal justice. While convinced that the therapeutic idiom does, in fact, dominate the drug court and that such courts have increased in popularity, the reader is also left with the impression that drug courts remain somewhat of an aberration and, moreover, that they continue to fight hard for every inroad they make. Therefore, Nolan's claim that drug courts' "unique qualities and consequences . . . portend to redefine the very meaning of justice" seems premature and deserving of far more elaboration.

As a cultural explanation for the rise of drug courts' popularity, Reinventing Justice leaves several gaps. As a description of a social movement, however, the book is insightful. Furthermore, the book offers a...