Leslie Paik, Discretionary Justice: Looking Inside a Juvenile Drug Court
| Author | Lizbet Simmons |
| Published date | 01 December 2013 |
| Date | 01 December 2013 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1462474513496989 |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
Punishment & Society 15(5)
others suggests that it is possible to reconcile therapeutic and legal interventions
with human rights and that the challenge of developing normative frameworks for
such programs is not insuperable.
Finally, although this book is focused exclusively on the United States, it might
be salutary to acknowledge that the US experience of drug courts is not the only
one. Even James Nolan, an early critic of drug courts (Nolan, 2001), in his later
work on the globalization of the problem solving court movement, showed that
there are significant aspects of legal culture that influence the operation of the
courts and that some jurisdictions are more conscious and protective of legal
rights than others. Although it led the way in developing such courts, perhaps
the US system is less than admirable in this respect (Nolan, 2009). An attack on
US drug courts is not an attack on all drug courts and nor should it be an attack on
all similar courts.
Is it possible to achieve justice in an unjust world? Imperfect as the criminal
justice system is, it may be necessary to settle for the good, and strive to make it
better, until the perfect is achieved.
References
Birgden A (2009) Therapeutic jurisprudence and offender rights: A normative stance is
required. Revista Juridica University of Puerto Rico 78(1): 43–60.
Nolan Jr JL (2001) Reinventing Justice: The American Drug Court Movement.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Nolan Jr JL (2009) Legal Accents, Legal Borrowing: The International Problem-Solving
Court Movement. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Rothman D (1980) Conscience and Convenience: The Asylum and Its Alternative in
Progressive America. New York: Aldine de Gruyter.
Arie Freiberg
Monash University, Australia
Leslie Paik, Discretionary Justice: Looking inside a Juvenile Drug Court, Rutgers University Press: New
Brunswick, NJ, 2011; 272 pp.: 9780813550077, $64.80 (cloth), $ 23.30 (pbk)
Juvenile drug arrests in the United States soared in the early 1990s, much as
they did for adults. In the adult population, drug arrests rose even though drug
use was declining or holding stable, a fact that has become part and parcel to
contemporary critiques of the war on crime. Juvenile drug use was, however, on
the rise in the early 1990s and that – combined with an earlier...
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