Abstract
Drug treatment courts have continued to gain local, state, and national support in the United States. In lieu of incarceration, participants receive treatment and work with a drug court team comprised of treatment specialists and criminal justice actors. Upon program completion, the participant receives a lesser sentence; if the participant does not fulfill requirements, the original charges stand. Given the overlap between medical and criminal views of addiction, drug courts operate through therapeutic surveillance, merging forms of care and control. This article asks: in what ways are participants made to become objects of therapeutic surveillance in drug court? Drawing on narrative criminology, I observed judge–participant interactions in thirty-one drug court sessions in a deindustrialized city in Upstate New York. I find that participants are storied into the program as both a “criminal-addict” (object of control, associated with Black criminality) and a “recovering-addict” (object of care, associated with White middle-class citizenship). This liminal and racialized drug court identity presumes two narrative endings in program completion: social/corporal disposability (prison or death) in criminality and addiction or freedom in productive citizenship. This narrative identity is developed throughout program participation, in admission to the program, progress meetings, and graduation/termination. As criminal justice programs mix punitive and medical approaches, ongoing consideration of identity, narrative, and therapeutic surveillance is warranted.
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Notes
“Judicial diversion” refers to when a defendant avoids a jail or prison sentence by partaking in court-based programs, such as those offered by drug treatment court.
The term, “addict,” is a stigmatizing label commonly used to refer to people who use drugs and/or might struggle with drug use and addiction. I use the terms, “criminal-addict” and “recovering-addict,” not as actual designations of individuals, but as stigmatizing identities that operate in drug court programming. As such, I use quotation marks around these terms.
A “field” is “an area of structured, socially patterned activity or ‘practice’” (Terdiman 1987: 805). In a field, individuals who are variously positioned compete over status and resources while adhering to collective beliefs and rules. Through participation, individuals internalize the field through sets of dispositions—what Pierre Bourdieu (1990) refers to as “habitus” and which Richard Terdiman (1987:811) describes as “the habitual, patterned ways of understanding, judging, and acting which arise from our particular position as members of one or several social ‘fields,’ and from our particular trajectory in the social structure.” In the language of sport, as Bourdieu (1990: 66) puts it, the habitus is the “feel for the game” as it affords participants “a meaning and a raison d’être, but also a direction, an orientation, an impending outcome, for those who take part and therefore acknowledge what is at stake.”
The “juridical field,” more specifically, is a social field that is comprised of legal actors, legal procedures, legal professions, and legal texts, as well as “legal culture” (Terdiman 1987: 806).
The time that I spent observing in the courtroom was part of two years of field research (from Winter 2017 to Spring 2019) in the same county. I met with drug policy advocates, public officials, treatment specialists, and people who use/deal (or had used and dealt) drugs. While I focus on drug court, this broader fieldwork informed my overall analysis.
I use pseudonyms and omit case information to maintain anonymity and confidentiality.
Drug court storytelling also permits a kind of state-sanctioned voyeurism, particularly when participants’ private life details, including medical information and familial relationships, are communicated in open court (Revier 2020).
For Jordan, another drug court participant, the judge felt that he should graduate despite his receiving a negative probation report. The judge remarked of the contrast between Jordan’s negative report and his overall progress, “It is like reading a book and you get floored by the ending.”
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank friends and colleagues in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Criminal Justice at Arcadia University. A special thanks goes to Toivo Asheeke, Olivia Consol, Favian Guertin-Martín, Rae Jereza, Bill Martin, Alexis Pleus, Andrew Pragacz, and Josh Price. I would also like to acknowledge the important work of Truth Pharm and Justice and Unity for the Southern Tier (JUST) in Upstate New York. Finally, I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback, as well as the drug court participants with whom I spoke inside and outside of the courtroom.
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Revier, K. “Without Drug Court, You’ll End Up in Prison or Dead”: Therapeutic Surveillance and Addiction Narratives in Treatment Court. Crit Crim 29, 915–930 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10612-021-09592-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10612-021-09592-y