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28 Chapter 3 What Court Day Is He? Intercourt Variations To illustrate the social construction of youth noncompliance , this chapter takes an in-depth look at one structural factor that impacts the drug court staff ’s assessments of youth noncompliance: the youth’s assignment to one of the program’s three court parts. These court parts meet on Tuesdays (east county), Wednesdays (north county), or Thursdays (south county), and youths are assigned based on where they live. In principle, the youth’s court assignment should not have any effect on the staff assessments of youth noncompliance, which are supposed to be based on the actions of the individual youths. Moreover, the three courts are part of one program, using the same policies, procedures, and resources—so staff in each court should interpret and respond to the same types of actions fairly consistently . Yet, despite these structural similarities, one of the three court parts— the north court—did appear to have a different impact on staff assessments of youth noncompliance and, subsequently, the youths’ overall progress in the court. The north court generally had the lowest number of noncompliant youths each week of all the three court parts.1 It also was able to process youths faster compared to the east court or south court. Many possibilities come to mind to explain this difference. One guess is that the north court youths were somehow different in demographic characteristics of race, class, and gender in ways that gave them more advantages or resources to remain in compliance with the court. They tended to be more middle class compared to the east court, which had youths from the poorest neighborhoods in the county and higher noncompliance rates. However, the south court youths were fairly similar demographically to those in the north court but had worse outcomes. Another explanation is that the north court youths lived in more geographically advantageous areas in terms of public transportation networks, schools, and treatment programs, making it easier for youths to comply with court requirements. In actuality, the north court covered the largest geographic area of the three courts, with the worst public transportation options.2 Youths in the north court had a harder time getting around, depending on rides from family and friends to get to school, treatment , and court, compared to the south court youths, who had the easiest time getting to their schools and treatment programs, which were concentrated on one or two large streets. It is also possible that the north court staff was more effective in influencing youths to change, compared to the staff in the other two courts. Sociologists James Eisenstein and Herbert Jacob attribute such a difference to a courtroom workgroup dynamic. Their 1977 book, Felony Justice: An Organizational Analysis of Criminal Courts, proposes the workgroup concept to characterize the ways that the working relationship between the judge, prosecutor, and defense attorney help shape case outcomes, in addition to the expected factors of the severity of the offense and the person’s criminal history . Others have used this concept to compare case outcomes in different courtrooms, either in the same county or across various counties. Jeffrey Ulmer argues in his 1997 book, Social Worlds of Sentencing: Court Communities under Sentencing Guidelines, that despite sentencing guidelines based exclusively on legal factors, the workgroup dynamic influenced the application of those guidelines among courts in three Pennsylvanian counties.3 So, even if the subcourts in the juvenile drug court used the same sanctioning guidelines , the presumption here would be that the north court workgroup was distinct from the other two courts in ways that led to a more favorable impact on the youth participants. This chapter uses the courtroom workgroup concept to highlight the social construction of youth noncompliance and the multifaceted notion of individual accountability. Eisenstein and Jacob break down the workgroup’s influence on the decision-making process as follows: the interdependence, stability, and familiarity among the courtroom actors; the specialization of cases (e.g., the more specialized the cases the more similar they are to one another, which leads to more routinized processing); and the importance of the workgroup’s goals (e.g., doing justice, maintaining group cohesion, disposing of caseload, and reducing uncertainty).4 This chapter suggests that the difference with the north court lies not only in staff familiarity but also in the structural differences such as staffing patterns, caseloads, and types of cases that affect the three subcourts’ ability to assess youth noncompliance.5 Therefore, it is important...

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