Feminized need and racialized danger: Punitive therapeutics and historical addict tropes in a Midwestern drug court
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/13624806211060867 |
| Published date | 01 February 2023 |
| Date | 01 February 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Feminized need and racialized
danger: Punitive therapeutics
and historical addict tropes in a
Midwestern drug court
Veronica Horowitz*
State University of New York at Buffalo, USA
Teresa Gowan
University of Minnesota Twin Cities, USA
*
Both authors contributed to this manuscript equally.
Abstract
Drug courts are widely praised as a therapeutic alternative to mass incarceration. Using
ethnographic discourse analysis, our intersectional comparison of a Midwestern court
demonstrates how gender and race create differentiated and unequal rehabilitative pro-
jects. Striking differences in treatment, sanctions, and requirements demonstrate the
lasting power of long-standing historical addiction tropes. Our primarily white and
African-American site re-inscribed the historical polarization between “white slaves”
and “drug zombies”, between the (traumatized female) “involuntary addict”and the dan-
gerous agency of the (racialized) male “criminal addict”. The explicit gender differenti-
ation between therapy for women and work for men was thus cross-cut by race,
with talk therapy for white women and neuro-scientific medicalization for white men
set against deep racio-cultural reform for African-Americans. While Black women
were encouraged to take on intensive mothering, Black men were subjected to the high-
est surveillance and suspicion, their struggles in the labor and housing markets misrecog-
nized as cultural deficiency.
Corresponding author:
Teresa Gowan, Sociology, University of Minnesota Twin Cities, 909 SocSci, 267 19th Ave S, Minneapolis,
Minnesota, USA.
Email: tgowan@umn.edu
Article
Theoretical Criminology
2023, Vol. 27(1) 23–47
© The Author(s) 2022
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/13624806211060867
journals.sagepub.com/home/tcr
Keywords
critical criminology, discourse, gender and class, race, treatment courts
The drug court system is widely supported as a humanistic alternative to the enormous
human costs of the 40-year War on Drugs. The number of drug offenders incarcerated
increased by 1115% between 1980 and 2010, driven by unprecedented arrests and
severe sentences for use, possession or small-time dealing (The Sentencing Project,
2021). Cascading reports, media treatments, protests, and social movements over the
years challenged the practicality and ethics of aiming such severe measures at non-violent
drug offenders.
Equally importantly, the drug war has become widely questioned as a racialized
project from conception to execution (Alexander, 2012). Two-thirds of the drug war’s
current prisoners are minorities (Carson and Mulako-Wangota, 2019) and at every
stage of the legal process—from being stopped and questioned, arrested, charged, prose-
cuted, or sentenced to prison—Black, Latino, and Native people are drawn faster and
deeper into the system than whites (Alexander, 2012; Walker, 1996). The hope for
drug courts, thus, includes a strong desire to “cure”and redeem a non-white majority
(Ho et al., 2018).
The over 3000 US drug courts that have opened since 1989 (Marlowe et al., 2016)
propose a solution: a “synthesis of therapeutic treatment and the judicial process”
(Hora et al., 1998: 453). The criminal legal system
1
identifies addiction-related crimes,
then applies the threat of incarceration to force individuals into treatment and recovery.
Forgoing the adversarial character of most criminal processes, court and treatment profes-
sionals collaborate to heal “clients”(not “defendants”) whose addiction renders them
unable to rationally represent themselves.
2
Does redefining drug war defendants as “clients”suffering from addiction in fact
deliver a reprieve from moral castigation and punishment? Despite claims to be
forging a radically different, profoundly therapeutic way of dealing with crimes commit-
ted by those afflicted by addiction, the courts resemble several older forms of American
punishment. Indeed, punitive practices have often been tangled with rehabilitative,
medical, and charitable logics and projects (Platt, 1977; Rothman, 1980). Some identify
a regular pendulum swing between punitive and reform movements, while others have
questioned the “progressive”character of reform itself (Goodman et al., 2017).
Whether looking at the development of juvenile courts (Platt, 1977) or the 1970s diver-
sion of African-American prisoners into psychiatric wards (Metzl, 2009), critical crimin-
ologists have argued that rehabilitative or therapeutic projects tend to retain or even
sharpen a punitive edge under the shadow of criminal legal control.
Indeed, drug courts and their partner treatment facilities generally require deep reso-
cialization through intensive coercion, discipline, and surveillance difficult to achieve
within regular incarceration (Gowan and Whetstone, 2012; Tiger, 2013). Yet a closer
examination of drug courts shows a highly differentiated process. Using ethnographic
discourse analysis, a method which draws out the interactional and embodied character
of “lived”discourse (Gowan, 2010), we study both men’s and women’s hearings at
24 Theoretical Criminology 27(1)
To continue reading
Request your trial