The Legitimacy of Change: Adopting/Adapting, Implementing and Sustaining Reforms within Community Corrections Agencies.

Many criminal justice institutions implement evidence-based reforms. While most scholars are aware of implementation challenges, we still know relatively little about sustainability. Using longitudinal data from criminal legal staff implementing an evidence-based reform, this paper considers: What happens during the implementation of an organizational reform that affects continued use of these reforms? Guided by an organizational change framework, findings suggest sustainability aligns with key organizational goals including legitimacy, efficiency and effectiveness. While all sites saw the reformed practices as legitimate enough to initially consider adoption, two sites never adopted, four sites toyed with reform, and two sites continued to use the reform after the study was over. This paper explores sustainability and identifies legitimacy as an important factor that affects the routinization of new practices. Transformation of organizational change initiatives into routine practices should consider efforts to build legitimacy in lieu of primarily rationalizing on the values of efficiency and effectiveness.

Front-Stage Stars and Backstage Producers: The Role of Judges in Problem-Solving Courts().

In problem-solving courts judges are no longer neutral arbitrators in adversarial justice processes. Instead, judges directly engage with court participants. The movement towards problem-solving court models emerges from a collaborative therapeutic jurisprudence framework. While most scholars argue judges are the central courtroom actors within problem-solving courts, we find judges are the stars front-stage, but play a more supporting role backstage. We use Goffman's front-stage-backstage framework to analyze 350 hours of ethnographic fieldwork within five problem-solving courts. Problem-solving courts are collaborative organizations with shifting leadership, based on forum. Understanding how the roles of courtroom workgroup actors adapt under the new court model is foundational for effective implementation of these justice processes.

Adding positive reinforcement in justice settings: acceptability and feasibility.

Although contingency management (CM) approaches are among the most promising methods for initiating drug abstinence (S. T. Higgins, S. M. Alessi, & R. L. Dantona, 2002; S. T. Higgins, S. H. Heil, & J. P. Lussier, 2004), adoption and implementation of CM protocols into treatment programs are both challenging and infrequent. In criminal justice agencies, where roughly 70% of clients report substance abuse issues (F. S. Taxman, K. L. Cropsey, D. W. Young, & H. Wexler, 2007), CM interventions are virtually nonexistent. The Justice Steps (JSTEPS) study uses a longitudinal, mixed-method design to examine the implementation of a CM-based protocol in five justice settings. This article presents qualitative data collected during Phase 1 of the JSTEPS project regarding the acceptability and feasibility of CM in these justice settings. The study finds a level of acceptability (find CM tolerable) and feasibility (find CM suitable) within justice agencies, but with some challenges. These challenges are reflected in the following: (a) incorporating too many desired target behaviors into CM models; (b) facing intraorganizational challenges when designing CM systems; and (c) emphasizing sanctions over rewards despite the evidence-base for positive reinforcers. These findings have implications for advancing the dissemination, adoption, and implementation of evidence-based treatments (and CM in particular) in criminal justice settings.