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Enforcing Freedom: Drug Courts, Therapeutic Communities, and the Intimacies of the State
In 1989, the first drug-treatment court was established in Florida, inaugurating an era of state-supervised rehabilitation. Such courts have frequently been seen as a humane alternative to incarceration and the war on drugs. Enforcing Freedom offers an ethnographic account of drug courts and mandatory treatment centers as a system of coercion, demonstrating how the state uses notions of rehabilitation as a means of social regulation.
Situating drug courts in a long line of state projects of race and class control, Kerwin Kaye details the ways in which the violence of the state is framed as beneficial for those subjected to it. He explores how courts decide whether to release or incarcerate participants using nominally colorblind criteria that draw on racialized imagery. Rehabilitation is defined as preparation for low-wage labor and the destruction of community ties with “bad influences,” a process that turns participants against one another. At the same time, Kaye points toward the complex ways in which participants negotiate state control in relation to other forms of constraint in their lives, sometimes embracing the state’s salutary violence as a means of countering their impoverishment. Simultaneously sensitive to ethnographic detail and theoretical implications, Enforcing Freedom offers a critical perspective on the punitive side of criminal-justice reform and points toward alternative paths forward.
Situating drug courts in a long line of state projects of race and class control, Kerwin Kaye details the ways in which the violence of the state is framed as beneficial for those subjected to it. He explores how courts decide whether to release or incarcerate participants using nominally colorblind criteria that draw on racialized imagery. Rehabilitation is defined as preparation for low-wage labor and the destruction of community ties with “bad influences,” a process that turns participants against one another. At the same time, Kaye points toward the complex ways in which participants negotiate state control in relation to other forms of constraint in their lives, sometimes embracing the state’s salutary violence as a means of countering their impoverishment. Simultaneously sensitive to ethnographic detail and theoretical implications, Enforcing Freedom offers a critical perspective on the punitive side of criminal-justice reform and points toward alternative paths forward.
360 pages, Hardcover
Published December 17, 2019
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July 29, 2021
I've said it before, I'll say it again.
I look at a Foucaultian like I like at a VHS tape.
"holy sh**...they still make you!!"
This book has some decent ethnographical analysis of drug courts and therapeutic communities replicating biopolitical and necropolitical control. I'm sure this person means well, and this is more a critique of the academic forces he is navigating, but I found this book really frustrating. The author's strategic incorporation (cooption?) of Black academics reveals a deeper, fundamental ignorance around race that makes the book not work. Rather than using an understanding of knowledge power nexus to criticize larger regimes of public health as a manifestation of white capitalist power through the larger social function of the nonprofit industrial complex, the author criticism is that these institutions are mandatory and should be voluntary and tied more deeply into evidence-based practice like motivational interviewing and cognitive behavioral therapy. This replaces one power-knowledge nexus with another, resituating academic elites and their institutions as key the liberation of the oppressed rather than giving communities the resources and power they need to form their own solutions.
Working-class black folks have pursued spiritually infused drug rehabilitation and agency affirming survival options like entrepreneurship as solutions to their addiction for decades, options the author doesn't even understand his analysis is actively working against. His simplistic solutions like a "job program" ignore the white nonprofit industrial/political complex that would be used to implement such programs that would further disempower and dislocate black communities. The author ignores literature that addiction itself is a disease of dislocation (Bruce Alexander's 'dislocation theory of addiction' ", failing to address key factors of gentrification and the cultural process of internalized black self-hatred as being key drivers of addiction that must be addressed. The entire system of drug treatment led by Black folks using Afrikan-centered spirituality has been produced, capturing many of the best elements of TC by attempting to liberate them from their eurocentric frameworks, but reading this book you would never know it.
In a particular anti- intersectional moment, the author claims that the treatment fails to focus on internalized self-hatred of LGBTQ patients, ignoring that many of these folks are also Black and that Black people, regardless of sexual identity, have suffered through self-hatred that can drive addiction. In a seriously cringe moment, the author admitted to participating in a "shakedown" where staff as an addiction facility ransack the rooms of the patients, an act which raises serious ethics and objectivity concerns. For a professor of abolitionist politics to partake in such a violent action really raises some real concerns for me, but apparently, this person gets to exist in the academy and call themselves an abolitionist scholar despite being a literal agent of (quazi) state violence agent to property of poor Black folks. This feels like an incredible violation to me, but this shows you how if you're in good standing within academic orthodoxy you can insulate yourself from criticism and accountability. My guess is that is why you haven't heard about this book, as if it got the big media push he would have to contend with this admission in more public settings.
Finally, the author is engaged with a subtle form of academic warfare with bodies of literature that would fundamentally challenge his analysis. Kaye continually cites Black theorists who are deemed "safe enough" and coops much of the rhetoric of the Afropessmists, who talk about the limits of liberal humanism and universal notions of rational white liberal subject excluding black folks from the category of humanity. While citing folks who have been less overt in their analysis being read as direct opposition to white postmodern academic theory (Spillers and Hartman), he refuses to cite folks whose work, though direct germane to his academic topic, have demanded their work be seen as challenge established postmodern theory, namely Tommy Curry, Frank Wilderson and Joy James. These theorists are not cited as they would fundamentally challenge the Foucauldian underpinning of his work, as they call out the fact that Foucault steals much of his analysis from folks like the Black panthers and his analysis of biopolitics ignores the fundamental question of how white civil society reproduces itself through not just Negrophobia, but Negrophilia and a perceived ability to speak comprehensively for Black suffering from an explicitly abstract eurocentric standpoint. Wilderson and Curry would lead to an analysis of the therapeutic community style addiction treatment he critiques AND the recommendations of the job programs and voluntary evidence-based treatment he recommends as being essentially the same, as both should be seen as attempts to traffic in Black suffering to extend the power of white civil society to present themselves as arbiters of what forms of incorporation into civil society are best for Blacks, and that white person should operate the institution and civic machinery in charge of that "reintegration of Black folks into civic community" a term he literally uses in his work. James might call both the treatment he analysis the solutions he champions as examples of a "captive maternal" where Black folks are forced to do work which strengthens the very civil society formations which oppress us and uses the survival work we do to care for each other within dominate instructions as creating legitimacy for the very institutions which we seek to destroy. Black folks themselves owning and operating political and civic machinery to deal with addiction and to reintegrate folks into forms of civil society we deem as appropriate are rendered to the position of unthought in the author's analysis, reflecting the authors seemingly has fallen into the very trap I imagine he and his academic followers would accuse the Afropessimists of falling into. The argument of Afropessmiism was never that there is no Black civil society, it is just there we are pessimistic about white folks, especially white liberals, seeing and valuing us as human beings. The author's complete ignorance on indigenous Black community solutions to addiction I believe is a fantastic example of this in real-time, leading him to solutions that assume that only white institutions can reintegrate black folks into the existing social order rather than giving us the money and power we need to allow our own civil society to solve our own problems.
It is a sad state of affairs where a white scholar gets to write this book and would likely be deemed "innovative" for citing cultural theorists like Hartman while Black kids in the academy are ruthlessly attacked for trying to bring folks like Wilderson into analysis like this. This allows nominally "anti-racist" white academics to de facto be anointed "leaders" on whats is the theoretical "cutting edge" on how to apply academic analysis to real work problems life drug courts. Conference invitations, book deals, and academic clout all follow, as long as you avoid citing (and thus giving juice to) the academics who are threats to our academic enclave (like Frank Wilderson, Tommy Curry, and Joy James) and are sure to cite folks who will support our academic fiefdoms claim to legitimacy and expertise, like Angela Davis and David Garland.
I look at a Foucaultian like I like at a VHS tape.
"holy sh**...they still make you!!"
This book has some decent ethnographical analysis of drug courts and therapeutic communities replicating biopolitical and necropolitical control. I'm sure this person means well, and this is more a critique of the academic forces he is navigating, but I found this book really frustrating. The author's strategic incorporation (cooption?) of Black academics reveals a deeper, fundamental ignorance around race that makes the book not work. Rather than using an understanding of knowledge power nexus to criticize larger regimes of public health as a manifestation of white capitalist power through the larger social function of the nonprofit industrial complex, the author criticism is that these institutions are mandatory and should be voluntary and tied more deeply into evidence-based practice like motivational interviewing and cognitive behavioral therapy. This replaces one power-knowledge nexus with another, resituating academic elites and their institutions as key the liberation of the oppressed rather than giving communities the resources and power they need to form their own solutions.
Working-class black folks have pursued spiritually infused drug rehabilitation and agency affirming survival options like entrepreneurship as solutions to their addiction for decades, options the author doesn't even understand his analysis is actively working against. His simplistic solutions like a "job program" ignore the white nonprofit industrial/political complex that would be used to implement such programs that would further disempower and dislocate black communities. The author ignores literature that addiction itself is a disease of dislocation (Bruce Alexander's 'dislocation theory of addiction' ", failing to address key factors of gentrification and the cultural process of internalized black self-hatred as being key drivers of addiction that must be addressed. The entire system of drug treatment led by Black folks using Afrikan-centered spirituality has been produced, capturing many of the best elements of TC by attempting to liberate them from their eurocentric frameworks, but reading this book you would never know it.
In a particular anti- intersectional moment, the author claims that the treatment fails to focus on internalized self-hatred of LGBTQ patients, ignoring that many of these folks are also Black and that Black people, regardless of sexual identity, have suffered through self-hatred that can drive addiction. In a seriously cringe moment, the author admitted to participating in a "shakedown" where staff as an addiction facility ransack the rooms of the patients, an act which raises serious ethics and objectivity concerns. For a professor of abolitionist politics to partake in such a violent action really raises some real concerns for me, but apparently, this person gets to exist in the academy and call themselves an abolitionist scholar despite being a literal agent of (quazi) state violence agent to property of poor Black folks. This feels like an incredible violation to me, but this shows you how if you're in good standing within academic orthodoxy you can insulate yourself from criticism and accountability. My guess is that is why you haven't heard about this book, as if it got the big media push he would have to contend with this admission in more public settings.
Finally, the author is engaged with a subtle form of academic warfare with bodies of literature that would fundamentally challenge his analysis. Kaye continually cites Black theorists who are deemed "safe enough" and coops much of the rhetoric of the Afropessmists, who talk about the limits of liberal humanism and universal notions of rational white liberal subject excluding black folks from the category of humanity. While citing folks who have been less overt in their analysis being read as direct opposition to white postmodern academic theory (Spillers and Hartman), he refuses to cite folks whose work, though direct germane to his academic topic, have demanded their work be seen as challenge established postmodern theory, namely Tommy Curry, Frank Wilderson and Joy James. These theorists are not cited as they would fundamentally challenge the Foucauldian underpinning of his work, as they call out the fact that Foucault steals much of his analysis from folks like the Black panthers and his analysis of biopolitics ignores the fundamental question of how white civil society reproduces itself through not just Negrophobia, but Negrophilia and a perceived ability to speak comprehensively for Black suffering from an explicitly abstract eurocentric standpoint. Wilderson and Curry would lead to an analysis of the therapeutic community style addiction treatment he critiques AND the recommendations of the job programs and voluntary evidence-based treatment he recommends as being essentially the same, as both should be seen as attempts to traffic in Black suffering to extend the power of white civil society to present themselves as arbiters of what forms of incorporation into civil society are best for Blacks, and that white person should operate the institution and civic machinery in charge of that "reintegration of Black folks into civic community" a term he literally uses in his work. James might call both the treatment he analysis the solutions he champions as examples of a "captive maternal" where Black folks are forced to do work which strengthens the very civil society formations which oppress us and uses the survival work we do to care for each other within dominate instructions as creating legitimacy for the very institutions which we seek to destroy. Black folks themselves owning and operating political and civic machinery to deal with addiction and to reintegrate folks into forms of civil society we deem as appropriate are rendered to the position of unthought in the author's analysis, reflecting the authors seemingly has fallen into the very trap I imagine he and his academic followers would accuse the Afropessimists of falling into. The argument of Afropessmiism was never that there is no Black civil society, it is just there we are pessimistic about white folks, especially white liberals, seeing and valuing us as human beings. The author's complete ignorance on indigenous Black community solutions to addiction I believe is a fantastic example of this in real-time, leading him to solutions that assume that only white institutions can reintegrate black folks into the existing social order rather than giving us the money and power we need to allow our own civil society to solve our own problems.
It is a sad state of affairs where a white scholar gets to write this book and would likely be deemed "innovative" for citing cultural theorists like Hartman while Black kids in the academy are ruthlessly attacked for trying to bring folks like Wilderson into analysis like this. This allows nominally "anti-racist" white academics to de facto be anointed "leaders" on whats is the theoretical "cutting edge" on how to apply academic analysis to real work problems life drug courts. Conference invitations, book deals, and academic clout all follow, as long as you avoid citing (and thus giving juice to) the academics who are threats to our academic enclave (like Frank Wilderson, Tommy Curry, and Joy James) and are sure to cite folks who will support our academic fiefdoms claim to legitimacy and expertise, like Angela Davis and David Garland.
November 29, 2019
Trenchant, compellingly written, a very nice blend of ethnography, history, and analysis.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews