Enforcing Freedom: Drug Courts, Therapeutic Communities and the Intimacies of the State

Abstract

In 1989, the first drug-treatment court was established in Florida, inaugurating an era of state-supervised rehabilitation. Such courts have frequently been seen as a humane alternative to incarceration and the war on drugs. This book offers an ethnographic account of drug courts and mandatory treatment centers as a system of coercion, demonstrating how the state uses notions of rehabilitation as a means of social regulation. Situating drug courts in a long line of state projects of race and class control, the author details the ways in which the violence of the state is framed as beneficial for those subjected to it. He explores how courts decide whether to release or incarcerate participants using nominally colorblind criteria that draw on racialized imagery. Rehabilitation is defined as preparation for low-wage labor and the destruction of community ties with "bad influences", a process that turns participants against one another. At the same time, the author points toward the complex ways in which participants negotiate state control in relation to other forms of constraint in their lives, sometimes embracing the state's salutary violence as a means of countering their impoverishment. Simultaneously sensitive to ethnographic detail and theoretical implications, the book offers a critical perspective on the punitive side of criminal-justice reform and points toward alternative paths forward. It masterfully shows how drug courts and associated therapeutic communities update concepts of cultures of poverty and biological race with contemporary idioms of addiction as brain disease and welfare dependency. Blending political and historical analysis of U.S. drug war and rehabilitation ideologies with keen ethnographic observation, this book is a must-read to understand the seduction of drug courts as a false alternative to racialized mass incarceration. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved)