Juvenile justice officials across the United States are embracing a new method of dealing with adolescent substance abuse. Importing a popular innovation from adult courts, state and local governments have started hundreds of specialized drug courts to provide judicial supervision and coordinate substance abuse treatment for drug-involved juveniles. The number of youth affected by these new courts is relatively small, but the programs are spreading rapidly and their presence is changing how practitioners and policymakers think about adolescent drug use. Despite the increasing popularity of juvenile drug courts, researchers have only begun to test whether they stop or reduce teen substance abuse more effectively than other programs. "Juvenile Drug Courts and Teen Substance Abuse" is the first book to examine the ideas behind juvenile drug courts and explore their history and popularity. The editors have assembled top justice policy experts to assess the evidence supporting juvenile drug courts and to guide the next generation of evaluation research. This book is organized into the following eight chapters: (1) Drug Courts in the Juvenile Justice System (Jeffrey A. Butts and John Roman); (2) American Drug Policy and the Evolution of Drug Treatment Courts (John Roman, Jeffrey A. Butts, and Alison Rebeck); (3) What Juvenile Drug Courts Do and How They Do It (Shelli Balter Rossman, Jeffrey A. Butts, John Roman, Christine DeStefano, and Ruth White); (4) Drug Court Effects and the Quality of Existing Evidence (John Roman and Christine DeStefano); (5) Defining the Mission of Juvenile Drug Courts (Jeffrey A. Butts, Janine M. Zweig, and Cynthia Mamalian); (6) Identifying Adolescent Substance Abuse (Daniel P. Mears); (7) Shaping the Next Generation of Juvenile Drug Court Evaluations (Jeffrey A. Butts, John Roman, Shelli Balter Rossman, and Adele V. Harrell); and (8) Building Better Evidence for Policy and Practice (John Roman and Jeffrey A. Butts). This book also contains an index and an appendix.