Spatio-Therapeutics: Drug Treatment Courts and Urban Space
| DOI | 10.1177/0964663910391521 |
| Published date | 01 June 2011 |
| Author | Marian Krawczyk,Lisa Freeman,Dawn Moore |
| Date | 01 June 2011 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Social & Legal Studies
20(2) 157–172
Spatio-Therapeutics:
ª The Author(s) 2011
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DOI: 10.1177/0964663910391521
Courts and Urban Space
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Dawn Moore
Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
Lisa Freeman
University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Marian Krawczyk
Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Abstract
This article explores the intersection of geography, law and treatment through the lens
of drug treatment courts. We show how the courts facilitate addiction treatment in part
through specific definitions of urban spaces as either healthy or unhealthy. We argue that
these definitions rely on the problematic notions that drug use is a geographically fixed
activity and that neighbourhoods deemed unhealthy (because of either drug using or
criminal activity) are essentially bad, void of any supportive features. These observations
lead us to a broader framework of ‘spatio-therapeutics’ which is simultaneously
productive and repressive.
Keywords
addiction treatment, criminology, drug treatment court, legal geography, rehabilitation,
spatialization, urban governance
Introduction
Socio-legal scholars approach legal geographies as a way to recognize not only how
space is produced by law but also how understandings and representations of space are
implicated in governing strategies (Blomley, 2003; Blomley et al., 2001; Cooper, 1998).
Corresponding author:
Dawn Moore, 1125 Colonel By Dr Ottawa, K1S 2B6
Email: dawn_moore@carleton.ca
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Social & Legal Studies 20(2)
Often these spatial practices have been theorized in repressive terms (as with anti-
homeless by-laws), as blanket strategies linked to securing territory, criminalizing
poverty and defining cultural identity (Beckett and Herbert, 2010; Collins and Blomley,
2003; Mitchell, 1997; Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos and FitzGerald, 2008). We are
interested in how the processes of governing urban spaces interact with criminal justice
based therapeutic initiatives which individualize notions of space to facilitate recovery
from both addiction and criminality.
We do this by looking at iterations of space in drug treatment courts (DTC). Our
observations come from field work in three Canadian DTCs located in Toronto, Ottawa
and Vancouver. We aim to reveal the productive and specific nature of space; how the
courts’ legal geography is vital to its project of making up people (Hacking, 1999). We
also reveal the discursive and practical strategies through which courts’ specific legal
geographies (which we call spatio-therapeutics) are constituted. We argue that to distin-
guish good and bad (or healthy and unhealthy) parts of the city, the courts rely on fixed
narratives of a particular urban space, narratives we aim to trouble. Drawing on classic
tropes for identifying bad zones of the city, drug use (and to a lesser extent crime) are
interpellated into an overarching narrative of the space, rendering the entire area (and
everyone in it) ‘bad’.
Spatio-Therapeutics
Nearly a decade after Blomley, Delaney and Ford (2001: xv) claimed, ‘[i]f social reality
is shaped by and understood (or constituted) in terms of the legal, it is also shaped by and
understood in terms of space and place’, it does not require much convincing to argue
that notions of space and place are tightly bound to understandings of both the law and
the social. More specifically, these two things, law and society, interact with and through
space and place. Indeed, there is now a rich body of literature which interrogates the
socio-legal world from the point of view of space (Blomley, 2003; Blomley et al.,
2001; Cooper, 1998; Delaney, 2003; Valverde, 2009). Critical scholars have come to
understand that space is itself a complicated notion, referring to discursive and material
realms, cultural understandings and legal definitions (Cooper, 1998). As such, there is a
range of ways in which space might be interrogated.
Foucault’s contributions have inspired new ways of approaching space (Crampton
and Eldon, 2007; Foucault, 2007; Mills, 2007; Wickham and Pavlich, 2005). Shields
(2001: 39) offers an apt summary of Foucault’s generative inspirations: ‘[Foucault
argues] conceptions of space . . . are part and parcel of notions of reality. Much more
than simply a world view, this sense of space, one’s ‘‘spatiality’’ is a fundamental com-
ponent of one’s relationship to the world’.
Shields is careful to make the wider point that notions of ‘spatiality’ are not limited to
the relationship between the self and the world but rather include, according to Foucault,
structures of governance and regulation. Citing the heavy spatial emphasis of Foucault’s
disciplinary regimes, Shields explains that for Foucault, ideas of what space is and what
it is meant for were important avenues of inquiry which directly inform lived realities of
different spaces. In large part Foucault’s legacy to legal geography (and indeed geogra-
phy more generally) is to encourage the study not of what space is but rather what it is
Moore et al.
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thought to be or represent. Discourses and representations of space are not ephemeral.
Instead, they have direct bearing on how spaces are used and experienced and, impor-
tantly, how people are governed as they move through or interact with them.
Under the increasing tyranny of ‘get tough’ strategies, scholars have documented (and
rightly so) that space in law is now routinely used as an articulation of largely repressive
state power intended to ghettoize (Wacquant, 2000), exclude and banish (Beckett and
Herbert, 2010). The end result of these strategies is a sanitized city in which undesirables
are denied access to certain parts of the urban landscape (Davis, 2002). Beckett and
Herbert (2010) note the punitive aspects of these interventions even as they are framed
in more liberal terms by their advocates.
Therapeutic interventions have also become an important point of inquiry in the field
of governance studies. Inspired by Nikolas Rose’s (1989, 1998; Miller and Rose, 2008)
work on psy knowledges and the psy professions, scholars are contributing to a broader
critique of therapeutic interventions which places innovations in therapeutic practice as
particular to times and places. For example, Ian Hacking (1991) charts the ‘discovery’ of
child abuse at the tip of a list of historical, political, medical and social antecedents
which congeal to make it possible to read particular behaviours as abuse of children.
Rose (2003) makes a similar point in the discovery of neurochemical roots of mood dis-
orders and the consequent move towards widespread pharmaceutical interventions for
those with anxiety or depression.
More specific to enterprises within criminal justice, scholars recognize how
the confluence of psy interventions and juridical powers often serves to amplify
control strategies as individuals are governed through particular psy identities.
Hannah-Moffat’s (1999) work on risk/need schemes in prisons shows these initiatives
often result in increasingly oppressive governing conditions as those labelled high
‘need’ also become high ‘risk’. Moore (2007) shows how criminal justice interven-
tions are dependant on psy identities like ‘the addict’ to mobilize an array of interven-
tions. In this sense, the role of psy in the justice system can be both productive and
repressive. These are important insights on which we wish to build by adding the
dimension of space into the framework. While it is clear that both space and therapeu-
tics are foundational to particular functions of criminal law, the spatiality of these
therapeutic aspects of law is rarely considered. This is surprising given that the ther-
apeutic aspects of space, or perhaps more accurately the spatial features of therapeu-
tics are recognized elsewhere (Conradson, 2003; Gesler, 1992). In socio-legal studies
and criminology little has been said about space and treatment beyond early writings
on prison design and the reform and rehabilitation movements (Foucault, 1977;
Rothman, 1980).
Our aim then is to bring these various fields into conversation with each other to
explore the confluence to law, space and therapy. The spatio-legal therapeutics we
uncover suggest heretofore unrecognized practices of law. While legal geographies have
focused largely on the repressive nature of governance through space, we discover gen-
erative capacity in law’s use of space towards therapeutic ends. The positive aims of
spatio-therapeutics are, however, complicated by their practice. In action, we find that
the use of space in shaping rehabilitative goals has a homogenizing effect in which nar-
row definitions of healthy space are deployed, excluding individuals from spaces they
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themselves might find healing even as official attempts to define therapeutic spaces
suggest otherwise. Therapeutic space is a contested province of law’s territory. In the
face of conflicting notions of the ‘what’ and ‘where’ of healing spaces and healing
places, individuals who come before the law can and do render counter notions of
spatio-legal therapeutics.
Drug Treatment Courts
Drug Treatment Courts are an ideal site in which to explore these ideas because the
courts themselves are designed to use law as a therapeutic tool. Further, because the
courts keep participants in the community (rather than prison) they must necessarily
function, at least in part, through defining and regulating urban space. Spatial restrictions
...
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