Drug courts and street level bureaucratic theory: testing the success of drug court policy implementation as a result of resource availability and management
Date
2022
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
What drug court program characteristics and drug court actor behaviors are most likely to determine whether or not a drug court participant will have a successful outcome by exiting the drug court program? The central actors in drug courts—judicial officers, court staff, prosecutors, treatment coordinators, public defenders, law enforcement, and other stakeholders—in the United States operate within their judicial role as well as in the role of policy implementor. As implementors, they have the essential and burdensome role of carrying out criminal justice, health, safety, and human rights agendas. Such responsibility can cause policy with the best intentions to be misunderstood or mis-implemented by human actors with significant amounts of discretion but a far less significant amounts of resources. ☐ This analysis served to test the theoretical framework of Lipsky’s Street Level Bureaucracy, a theory examining the role of public service workers as policy decision-makers, within the drug court setting. Drug court actors, including judicial officers, law enforcement, legal counsel, staff, and consulting coordinators all serve as Street Level Bureaucrats within these institutions of justice. This secondary, independent test-based data analysis analyzed a sample of 1,141 adult drug courts, 306 family drug courts, and 282 juvenile drug courts (n = 1,729) in the United States and its territories taken from the 2012 Census of Problem-Solving Courts conducted by the Bureau of Justice. This study supplements the previous literature on case management and court policies. It explains some variations in drug-court specific SLB behavior with regards to program capacity and goals, resource availability and management, team composition and training, and direct contact, or discretion, with and in relation to drug court participants (or “clients”), and assessed how these drug court characteristics and behaviors associated with policy decision-making—including composition, resources, and goals—affected the likelihood that participants would successfully exit their programs. ☐ Funding, specialized training for drug court actors, review session attendance by drug court actors, and program capacity are associated with successful program exit outcomes for participants in adult drug courts. Having a dedicated public defender on the drug court team, the mandating of specialized training for judicial officers and program coordinators, and program capacity are associated with successful program exit outcomes for participants in family drug courts, and funding, judge presence in review meetings, and program capacity are associated with successful program exit outcomes for participants in juvenile drug courts. Given that these data are actionable, there are several potential policies worth recommending, with the implementation of consistent, mandatory, and specialized training for drug court team members being the strongest and most effective potential action.
Description
Keywords
Drug court, Drug policy, Human discretion, Implementation, Lipsky, Street level bureaucracy