Therapeutic Discipline: The Governance of Addicted Criminal Offenders In Adult Drug Treatment Court

Photo Priscilla Du Preez via Unsplash

The past thirty years has witnessed an explosive growth in the addition of specialized problem-solving courts as institutions operating within the nation’s criminal justice system. The most widespread form of problem-solving court today is the drug treatment court. Developed largely in response to the failure of the War on Drugs and the revolving door of justice whereby offenders with substance abuse issues cycle in and out of incarceration, drug treatment courts are focused on providing criminal offenders with intensive drug treatment and therapy in helping them to break free from criminality as well as their drug addictions. This in-depth case study focuses on the Adams County Drug Treatment Court. The purpose of this study is to investigate the micro-level processes by which the court manages criminal offenders and offers them treatment for their severe drug addictions. Using the Foucauldian lens of “governmentality,” I identify an overarching strategy of governance which I conceptualize as “therapeutic discipline.” Therapeutic discipline encompasses both the utilization of a discourse of accountability together with unwritten, routine techniques of governance which result in patterned practices through which the Adams County Drug Treatment Court molds its participants into self-regulating, productive citizens fitting for the neoliberal order. The concept of “therapeutic discipline” captures the way in which punitive legal sanctions are justified and rationalized by the court through an institutional desire to help participants in their recovery efforts. The empirical findings from this project advance governmentality studies by unpacking new and novel ways in which the governance of criminal offenders is accomplished. This research study also expands our general understanding regarding the quotidian operations of drug treatment courts, a focus that is still underdeveloped in the scholarly literature.