Making the criminal addict: Subjectivity and social control in a strong-arm rehab

Abstract

The mandatory, state-subsidized treatment opened up by drug courts and other jail and prison diversion programs have massively expanded the numbers of the nation's poor and working class who are labeled addicts and sent to rehab, making drug rehabilitation a primary site for the re-socialization and control of the poor. Drawing on ethnographic and interview data, this article examines the institutional form at the center of this process: the 'strong-arm' rehabilitation facilities most closely tied to drug courts, probation, and parole. The therapeutic community tradition's long-standing practices of moral reform through intensive behavior modification are now mobilized by the state on a large scale, transformed into a 'fuzzy edge' of the criminal justice system which resocializes far more intensively than most forms of incarceration. We understand the 'medicalization' represented by strong-arm rehab not as a reprieve from judgment, but instead as a process of translation and amplification. Translated by staff into therapeutic, moral, and finally cultural versions, the biochemical 'diagnosis' of pathology comes to serve as a neutral, medicalized front behind which the systemic injuries of race and class disappear. Instead, the strongarm process amplifies the taint of addiction into a new biologization of poverty and race.

Beyond Punishment: The Penal State's Interventionist, Covert, and Negligent Modalities of Control

“…As this case illustrates, the state sought to transform those it deemed needing reconstruction of the self, but in less expressively punitive ways than those documented in studies of court‐mandated drug treatment facilities (McKim ; Kaye ; Gowan and Whetstone ; McCorkel ) and long beyond the length of women's formal correctional sentences. Additionally, the moral foundation of the twelve‐step logic and recovery homes' faith‐based approaches drew connections between morality and sobriety.…”

“I Went Through it so You Don't Have To”: Faith‐Based Community Organizing for the Formerly Incarcerated

“…Social science research has suggested that religion or state‐sanctioned faith‐based programming may deter drug use, crime, and recidivism (i.e., Dodson, Cabage, and Klenowski ; Jensen and Gibbons ; Johnson ; O'Connor and Perreyclear ; O'Connor, Ryan, and Parkikh ). However, another strand of social science has also asserted that rehabilitation socializes formerly incarcerated persons as risk‐bearing subjects (i.e., Fairbanks ; Gowan and Whetstone ; Haney ; Kaye ) and subordinates them to contingent labor markets (Haney ; Peck ; Peck and Theodore ).…”

Intervention: Reality TV, Whiteness, and Narratives of Addiction

“…The characters, narrative tropes, and treatment options depicted on Intervention sit in striking opposition to the broader social context of the criminalization of drug use by African American and Latina/o people and the disproportionate incarceration rates in the United States. In contrast, Intervention frames the characters' stories of addiction as individual ''tragedies'' rather than collective ''social problems'' associated with drug use by African Americans and Latinas/os (Gowan & Whetstone, 2012). Instead of the punitive approach meted out to drug users through government-sponsored drug wars and on shows such as Cops or Locked Up, Intervention's televisual, therapeutic approach to addiction embodies whiteness.…”