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My dissertation in three words:
Fuck drug courts. https://twitter.com/jessicahuseman/status/1319462298621267970
Fuck drug courts. https://twitter.com/jessicahuseman/status/1319462298621267970
My dissertation in several more words: drug courts are part of the apparatus of criminalization that construes ppl who use drugs as perpetually and essentially guilty.
In drug court, “clean” toxicology is read as mere compliance (not sincere effort to stop using drugs); toxicology reports evidencing substance use as the “truth” of the defendants’ essential nature. This reproduces what @KhalilGMuhammad calls “The Condemnation of Blackness”
Or the conscription of Blackness into criminality, and the production of Black people as perpetually available to the PIC for surveillance and punishment. Even if defendants avoid jail time, alternatives to incarceration are not alternatives to criminalization.
Drug Courts function through an ideology of consent and contract — guilty pleas — but a materialist understanding of the law belies the notion of “two equal and consenting parties” — the asymmetrical contract is enforced by state violence.
After bail reform* went into effect in NYS, a program manager for a city drug court told me that people “choosing” diversion had massively fallen off: “without pretrial detention, we have no stick to force people into drug court,” he said.
*fuck bail reform tho; end pretrial detention NOW.
While liberals like to believe that rehabilitation is the progressive alternative to punishment, the fact is that carceral + medical approaches to substance use have always been intertwined in the US. In fact, rehabilitation itself is a penological ideal.
In sum, as @MayaSchenwar + @LVikkiml point out, “therapeutic” alternatives to prison in the context of the racist sexist carceral state merely redistribute modes of punishment and control, they do not eliminate them.
