Care beyond justice: The conflicted ethics of drug treatment courts

Care Beyond Justice is a dissertation based on ethnographic fieldwork at three metropolitan drug treatment courts in the United States. Drug treatment courts are specialized courts within the criminal justice system that offer eligible defendants a chance at treatment instead of incarceration. Unlike previous studies of drug courts, I approach drug court practitioners as care workers. Yet because drug courts exist within the criminal justice system, these care workers temper the principles and priorities of criminal justice (fairness, equality, rule of law, objectivity, impartiality, and penality) with a practice of care, which tends to require local, situated assessments of need as well as access. These are often competing ethical responsibilities. I illustrate this conflict in multiple ways. I situate drug courts within a history of drug policy that is conflicted by related questions about whether to treat or punish addicts and addiction, a decision that has historically skewed along racial and class divisions. Drug courts change the justice system model in many ways in the interest of being therapeutic. Instead of maintaining the oppositional adversarial model of a trial, they take a teamwork approach to the coordination of defendants’ treatment. They apply “maximum flexibility” with regard to evidentiary standards instead of the strict procedural rules of trial courts. They prize “communication” with their partnering drug treatment agencies from the private sector. However, some competing ethics of justice – like individual responsibility, penality, and objective standards – feature prominently in drug court practice, degrading the provision of responsive and ethical care. Compliance is a concept that too often holds the subjects of care wholly responsible for following a treatment plan, when the goals of care would be better served by shared responsibility to tweak and tinker treatment to the always changing rhythms of life. Collaborative and communicative efforts to provide the best care are not helped by the threat of imminent punishment against the subjects of care. Many legal practitioners have worried that drug courts compromise principles of justice. Indeed, they may. But I argue that they represent an opportunity to carve out a space within the justice system that prioritizes care over the demands of objective justice. Thus, Care Beyond Justice is an aspirational title. Instead of staging tests of defendants’ compliance and commitment to treatment, prioritizing care would mean collaborating in the interest of multiple definitions of success and recovery, allowing more defendants to graduate and enjoy the benefits of life outside of prison and without the devastating consequences of criminal records.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Anthropology

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2018

Author dc:creator

• Metzner, Emily M.

Contributors dc:contributor

• Moodie, Ellen
• Rosas, Gilberto
• Dominguez, Virginia R.
• Roberts, Samuel K.

• Care
• Criminal justice

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2017 Emily M. Metzner

Language dc:language

en

Handle dc:identifier

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/99199

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/99199