The number of people incarcerated in the United States now exceeds 2.3 million, due in part to the increasing criminalization of drug use: over 25 percent of people incarcerated in jails and prisons are there for drug offenses. This book examines this increased criminalization of drugs and the medicalization of addiction in the United States by focusing on drug courts, where defendants are sent to drug treatment instead of prison. It explores how advocates of these courts make their case for what they call “enlightened coercion,” detailing how they use medical theories of drug addiction to jus ... More

The number of people incarcerated in the United States now exceeds 2.3 million, due in part to the increasing criminalization of drug use: over 25 percent of people incarcerated in jails and prisons are there for drug offenses. This book examines this increased criminalization of drugs and the medicalization of addiction in the United States by focusing on drug courts, where defendants are sent to drug treatment instead of prison. It explores how advocates of these courts make their case for what they call “enlightened coercion,” detailing how they use medical theories of drug addiction to justify increased criminal justice oversight of defendants who, through this process, are defined as both “sick” and “bad.” The book shows how these courts fuse punitive and therapeutic approaches to drug use in the name of a “progressive” and “enlightened” approach to addiction. It argues that the medicalization of addiction has done little to stem the punishment of drug users because of a key conceptual overlap in the medical and punitive approaches—that habitual drug use is a problem that needs to be fixed through sobriety. The book presses policymakers to implement humane responses to persistent substance use that remove its control entirely from the criminal justice system and ultimately explores the nature of crime and punishment in the United States today.