Juvenile Drug Courts: Understanding the Importance of Dimensional Variability

Abstract

Juvenile drug courts have emerged as “innovative” responses to juvenile drug offenders, but comparatively little is known about their operations. Using Goldkamp's typology of adult drug courts and secondary analyses of Cooper and Bartlett's data from a national-level survey of juvenile drug courts, this article first describes these courts and then analyzes the variability in key dimensions of juvenile drug courts that were operating in the United States on January 1, 1998. Results showed that juvenile drug courts have great variation across their key dimensions (e.g., target populations, target problems, court processing focus, and candidate screening and evaluation). The authors raise questions about future research that might ignore the variance across the key dimensions of juvenile drug courts that were uncovered.