Teen courts are becoming a popular mechanism whereby to process youngsters charged with relatively minor offenses. There has been limited systematic analysis of teen courts to identify either their successes or failures. This study examines the teen court of Doña Ana County, New Mexico, including its processes and apparent recidivism rates. The 478 participants were randomly selected from the program and traced through the local Juvenile Probation and Parole Office (JPPO) database. Interviews were conducted with a teen court staff member, JPPO staff members, and former teen court participants. A 25% recidivism rate was found between 1994 and 1998, affected by gender, age, the presence of a prior referral, whether the youngster completed the teen court program, with whom the juvenile resided, and the severity of the jury sentence. The study—the first of its kind for this court—was able to identify some of the successes and shortcomings of this county's teen court.

We conducted an evaluation of an experimental Driving-While-Intoxicated (DWI) Drug Court treatment program operated by a single municipal court. Specially trained court personnel assessed first-time (and, as we found out, some second-time) DWI offenders for symptoms of alcoholism. Once court personnel reached a clinical determination that an individual was an alcoholic, research team members randomly assigned that person to either the treatment program or to a control group receiving normal municipal court processing. A third group consisted of a like number of randomly selected, nonalcoholic, first-time offenders. The conviction records of all three groups were tracked for up to 24 months following the initial DWI conviction. We found significantly fewer alcohol-related and other serious crime reconvictions for the nonalcoholic group. Among those determined to be alcoholic, the treatment group had significantly fewer reconvictions than the control group. We address the implications and limitations of our findings for similar experimental studies in criminal justice and for DWI Drug Court treatment programs.

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This research examines the legal processing of girls in the context of intake workers' perceptions of girls' delinquency in a large southwestern county in which Mexican-Americans are the numerical majority. Using official records and in-depth interviews, girls' delinquency and the complexities of intake workers' perceptions of gender, ethnicity and social class are examined. With the exception of a low number of referrals for drugs, girls were referred for those offenses most common among girls nationally: shoplifting, status offenses, and simple assaults. Juvenile Probation and Parole Officers (JPPOs) explained girls' referrals in the context of family and other relationships. Girls were described as sexualized and manipulative. JPPOs identified white girls as privileged and linked this privilege to conflict with parents. Latinas were described as experiencing the most pressure toward traditional gender roles and a sex-based double standard. The implications of these data for juvenile justice decision-making and policy in this jurisdiction are discussed.

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The ethical orientations of two cohorts of officers in a large state police organization were identified using an ethical orientation questionnaire that measures scales of idealism and relativism. Cohort 1 was measured during the recruit academy and after one year on the job. Cohort 2 was measured at one year on the job and two years. This research examined the ethical orientations of these two cohorts, the ethical orientation differences between the two cohorts and characteristics associated with those differences. There were significant differences in the ethical orientations of Cohort 1 officers between the first and second measurement. New recruits tend toward the idealistic ethical dimension more than one‐year officers. One‐year officers tend more toward the relativistic ethical dimension than new recruits. Similar but non‐significant differences were found in Cohort 2.

This article deals with the evolution of the Gang Resistance Education and Training program (G.R.E.A.T.), from conceptual idea to policy implementation. In late May 1991, U.S. Senator Dennis DeConcini attended a "town hall meeting" of Phoenix-area police agencies. At that meeting, informal discussions about a law enforcement-based anti-gang program similar to Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) was discussed. By the spring of 1992, a prototype program was presented to a school in the Phoenix area. Within months of this offering, the resulting program was being offered in schools across the nation. From that point to the present, there seems to be little disagreement as to what has transpired. It is toward the origins of the program that this article is directed, and to the sometimes tortuous path that the program and its progenitors followed to go from idea to implementation of G.R.E.A.T. Ultimately, our goal is to compare and contrast this instance of intergovernmental cooperation with the extant literature and determine the extent to which the creation of G.R.E.A.T. as a case study adds to our understanding of how criminal justice policy moves from an idea to implementation.

This study examines the implementation of juvenile detention policy by comparing decision making in two jurisdictions where Hispanics represent the numerical majority of the population. One jurisdiction is rural and the other is a jurisdiction with over 1000,000 population. Interviews with juvenile justice probation and parole officers and judges are combined with a quantitative analysis of official records from 1994. Detention decision making is different in these jurisdictions. There is more formal processing and detention of juveniles in the rural jurisdiction. This is attributable to a perception of the community as heterogeneous rather than homogeneous, and a lack of alternatives as compared to the non‐rural jurisdiction.