Journal Article

For Every Order There Is a Disorder: Augustine and Criminalized Care in the Drug Court Model of Addiction Treatment

Waters, Sonia

2022

Overview

Drug court programs are informed by the disease concept of addiction, but those who suffer from substance use disorders remain guilty of their charges. To avoid further punishment, they must agree to treatment and also become subject to all the mandates of the court, including issues regarding housing, childcare, education, and employment. Thus, rather than changing the War on Drugs, the drug court movement has effectively preserved the criminalization of substance use while extending the carceral state. Through a reflection on Augustine’s concept of order in the Christian faith, this article explores the logics behind our assumption that punishment has a healing or ordering effect on appetitive desire. I suggest that multiple concept pairs related to order and disorder make it “feel right” or commonsensical to subject disposable populations—the poor, BIPOC individuals, and the mentally ill—to punishment as a kind of reform within which the individual order and the social order combine. The three strands of appetitive vice, race, and poverty wind together throughout the history of reform, and medical knowledge has often aided rather than corrected this process. I conclude by considering how these strands help us move toward a liberative understanding of addiction as a symptom of social pathology.

• Publisher: Springer Nature B.V
• Subject: Alternative sentencing / Child care / Courts / Criminalization / Disease concept / Disorders / Drug abuse / Drug addiction / Drug courts / Drug policy / Drug use / Drugs / Employment / Healing / Housing / Low income groups / Medicine / Mental disorders / Pathology / Poverty / Punishment / Race / Reforms / Social order / Substance abuse treatment / Substance use disorder