Courts as Organizations: A Study of Three Veterans Treatment Courts in Practice

• In Event: Examining Legal Dynamics in the Criminal Legal System

Abstract

This paper analyzes the emergence of three Veterans Treatment Courts in the Northeast, Southeast, and Western regions of the US with the broader goal of understanding what Veterans Treatment Courts tell us about inequality in the United States and how we use law to solve entrenched social and political problems. Veterans treatment courts enable qualifying veterans in the criminal legal system to receive substance use and mental health treatment which, if successfully completed, gives the participants a criminal legal benefit. They are now the second most common treatment court in the country, despite their proliferation beginning just 15 years ago. Overall, the paper reveals the limits of the common narrative--that VTCs are uniquely beneficial for a uniquely deserving group of criminal legal defendants-- by showing how VTCs actually emerge.

I argue that VTCs are not a new criminal-legal technology uniquely suited to help veterans. They build from existing criminal-legal and social service infrastructure in a given locale. As a result, they have strikingly different goals and strategies that reflect the specific steps of their founding, the resources available to them, and the individuals working in them.

This paper also reveals how treatment courts develop day-to-day practices based on their need to establish and maintain their legitimacy. As Ashford and Gibbs explain, a legitimate organization is one that accords with social norms, values, and expectations, pursuing socially acceptable goals in a socially acceptable manner (Ashford and Gibbs 1990, 177 ). VTCs carry with them the legitimacy of the military and criminal-legal system as defining institutions of US society. At the same time, this analysis of the founding of the three VTCs shows that “socially acceptable goals and manner” are locally defined. Each VTC must respond to its distinct social and political contexts.

These local origin stories also provide insights why VTCs are difficult to compare. These three courts not only have different approaches to what they do and who they serve but also about what they are supposed to do. Treatment courts are designed to be hybrid—a blend of justice and rehabilitation. VTCs, however, are complex because they blend two types of treatment courts (i.e., drug court and mental health court) and add in the common narrative that there is something more special about veterans than others in treatment courts. The origin stories show the holes in that narrative. Each court decides who it counts as a veteran and what counts as help. Should a new VTC create itself based on the drug court model, the mental health court model, a hybrid, or something altogether unique for the chosen group of participants they plan to serve?

Each court analyzed in this paper addressed these complex questions differently. The Northeast VTC elected to be liberal in its admission policies but made sure that participants first pled guilty in order to receive the court’s treatment benefits. The Southeast VTC implemented the national drug court model: get and keep participants sober and help them back into the workforce. The West VTC strives to keep their highly vulnerable population alive, get them as many social services as possible, and minimize the negative consequences of the criminal justice system.

VTCs are also complicated by a foundational contradiction: they are predicated on the deleterious effects of the military on participants while implicitly celebrating the military to establish the courts’ legitimacy. These origin stories reveal how this contradiction shaped each court’s founding, with those promoting VTCs as an to aid a group they saw as both uniquely vulnerable and (sometimes) uniquely resourced. These three courts drew on both ideological and material resources to establish their legitimacy with their own stakeholders to meet distinct goals and strategies.

As a policy matter, to create a successful VTC, these findings underscore the need to lay specific groundwork with stakeholders. These courts’ practices are based on the choices of the person or team who started each one, why they started it, and they how started it. What they have in common is the ongoing reliance in the US on criminal justice to solve entrenched social and political problems related to substance abuse, mental health, poverty, and now militarism and war. They are each shaped by their local institutional and organizational environments. They each depend on the availability of social services and the functionality of the local court agencies. And they must each find creative solutions to aid the populations that they serve.

Through this analysis, we see how a court predicated on the existence of a unique military culture masks entrenched, deeply local social inequalities that create challenges and differences for the vulnerable veterans who find themselves in a VTC program.

Author

• Jamie Rowen, University Mass Amherst