The following timely article on the criminalization and medicalization of addiction appeared in The Influence on April 13, 2016.
Like the "Girl Who Hides a Razor Blade in Her Mouth," Coerced Addiction Treatment Has Many Victims
By Susan Sered
Kahtia “acted out” from a young age. At least that’s what the counselors involved in her case said. The reality, Kahtia recounts, is that she wanted to get away from the horrific sexual abuse in her home. By age 12 she was in residence at a juvenile treatment institution. By age 13 she was tired of being locked up.
After running away she had a few good years, during which she was adopted by a New York City gang whose leader had heard impressive stories about “the girl who hides a razor blade in her mouth to protect herself.” Later on she contributed to the gang through some high-priced prostitution and exotic dancing at upscale clubs. “Then,” she explains, “I was dealing drugs and became my own best customer.” The high-end sex work descended to street work, and Kahtia spent the next 15 years or so in and out of prisons and jails.
By the time I met her in 2008 (I have come to know her as part of an ongoing project with formerly incarcerated Boston-area women) she was spending far more time in treatment programs than in jail. Over the years, Kahtia has been sent by the courts, social workers, child welfare workers and doctors to residential treatment both in and out of jail, to outpatient multi-service clinics, gender-sensitive therapeutic groups, methadone treatment and ubiquitous 12-step programs.
What Should “Alternatives to Incarceration” Mean?
As a national consensus seems to be building around the idea that people who use drugs problematically are mentally ill and need treatment rather than incarceration, Kahtia’s experiences shed needed light on the concept as well as the practicalities of the “alternatives to incarceration,” which are garnering more enthusiasm than critical examination around the country.
Conceptually, the term “alternatives to incarceration” takes for granted that we are talking about ways to handle criminals who otherwise would need to be incarcerated—that incarceration is a reasonable baseline against which to measure “alternatives.” In light of the over-representation of Americans of color and low-income Americans in jails and prisons, however, it’s necessary to be careful about any sort of presumption of correlation between criminality and incarceration. In fact, about a third of people locked up in the US are awaiting trial; that is, they have not been convicted of a crime. Another third are locked up because they violated the terms of probation or parole; that is, the “criminal” act was not sufficiently egregious to require imprisonment but a subsequent action—often simply not showing up for a meeting with a parole or probation officer, or failing to keep up restitution payments or money owed in court fees—was the And 97 percent of federal and state criminal prosecutions are resolved by plea bargain —often accepted by defendants out of fear that if they don’t accept the deal they will be locked up even longer— rather than by trial.
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