Abstract
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.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
For Augustine, all social roles had their place in the order of a society. Even the executioner, though a lower species of man, has his just function in the whole, as does “the prostitute,” who is placed at the lowest social level but offers a pragmatic response to the problem of lust (at the end of his career, in his well-named Retractions, he disavowed this latter claim as giving too much credence to the appetites). In an ordered society, there are naturally some categories of humans who are lower than others in the organization of their roles.
References
American Psychiatric Association (1980). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (3rd ed.)
American Psychiatric Association (1994). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (4th ed.)
American Psychiatric Association (2013). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (5th ed.). https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.books.9780890425596
Aquinas, T. (1947). Summa theologiae (Fathers of the English Dominican Province, Trans). Benziger Bros. edition. New Advent. https://www.newadvent.org/summa. (Original work published ca. 1265–1274)
Augustine (2003). The works of Saint Augustine: A translation for the 21st century, vol. 2 (B. Ramsey, Trans.) New City Press. (Original work published ca. 390 C.E.)
Augustine. (2010). On the free choice of the will. In P. King, Trans.(Ed.) (Ed.), On the free choice of the will, on grace and free choice, and other writings. Cambridge University Press. (Original work published ca. 391–395 C.E.)
Augustine (2012). The confessions: Saint Augustine of Hippo (M. Boulding, Trans.; D. V. Meconi, Ed.). Ignatius Critical Edition. Ignatius Press. (Original work published ca. 397–400 C.E.)
Augustine (1998). The city of God against the pagans (R. W. Dyson, Ed.) Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought. Cambridge University Press. (Original work published ca. 426 C.E.)
Black, E. (2012). War against the weak: Eugenics and America’s campaign to create a master race. Expanded edition. Dialog Press
Boone, M. (2016). The conversion and therapy of desire. Wipf and Stock
Cooper, C. S. (2016). Drug courts—Just the beginning: How to get other areas of public policy in sync. Substance Use & Misuse, 42(2–3), 243–256. https://doi.org/10.1080/10826080601141982
Cress, D. (1989). Augustine’s privation account of evil: A defense. Augustinian Studies, 20, 109–128
Drug Policy Alliance (2020, August 6). Drug Policy Alliance proposes federal all-drug decriminalization, releases new legislative framework. https://drugpolicy.org/press-release/2020/08/DrugPolicyReformAct
Eaglin, J. M. (2016). The drug court paradigm. American Criminal Law Review, 53(3), 595–640
Easterling, C. H. (2000). The social costs of treatment programs. Journal of Religion and Health, 39(1), 43–49. https://www.jstor.org/stable/27501174
Georges, S. (2016). Drug court and the medically assisted treatment debate. Journal of Health & Biomedical Law, 12(1), 29–36
Griffith, A. (2020). God’s law and order: The politics of punishment in evangelical America. Harvard University Press
Hinton, E. (2017). From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The making of mass incarceration in America. Harvard University Press
Jennings, W. (2010). The Christian imagination: Theology and the origins of race. Yale University Press
Kaye, K. (2019). Enforcing freedom: Drug courts, therapeutic communities, and the intimacies of the state. Studies in Transgression. Columbia University Press
Manetsch, S. (2006). Pastoral care East of Eden: The Consistory of Geneva. Church History, 75(2), 1568–1582. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27644766
McKim, A. (2017). Addicted to rehab: Race, gender, and drugs in the era of mass incarceration. Rutgers University Press
McPherson, C. M., & Sauder, M. (2013). Logics in action: Managing institutional complexity in a drug court. Administrative Science Quarterly, 58(2), 165–196. https://doi.org/10.1177/0001839213486447
National Association of Drug Court Professionals. (n.d.). Treatment courts work. https://www.nadcp.org/treatment-courts-work/
Nelson, J. B. (2004). THIRST: God and the alcoholic experience. Westminster John Knox Press
Parker, L. R. (2005). Mental health courts: Moving beyond the drug court model. Developments in Mental Health Law, 24(1), 1–16
Roberts, N. (2018). Addiction and pastoral care. Canterbury Press
Robinson, S. M., & Adinoff, B. (2016). The classification of substance use disorders: Historical, contextual, and conceptual considerations. Behavioral Sciences, 6(3), 18. https://doi.org/10.3390/bs6030018
Rogers-Vaughn, B. (2016). Caring for souls in a neoliberal age. Palgrave Macmillan
Rosen, C. (2004). Preaching eugenics: Religious leaders and the American eugenics movement. Oxford University Press
Shaffer, D. K. (2011). Looking inside the black box of drug courts: A meta-analytic review. Justice Quarterly, 28(3), 493–521. https://doi.org/10.1080/07418825.2010.525222
Skotnicki, A. (2019). Conversion and the rehabilitation of the penal system: A theological rereading of criminal justice. Oxford University Press
Trostyanskiy, S. (2015). The philosophical tenets and content of Augustine’s social doctrine. In T. Delgado, J. Doody, & K. Paffenroth (Eds.), Augustine and social justice (pp. 27–48). Lexington Books
Waters, S. (2019a). Addiction and pastoral care. William B. Eerdmans
Waters, S. (2019b). Prophetic sickness: The effects of low-socioeconomic status in substance addiction. Sacred spaces: The E-journal of the former American Association of Pastoral Counselors (AAPC), 11(8), 29–52
Waters, S. (2018). Punishing the immoral other: Penal substitutionary logic in the war on drugs. Pastoral Psychology, 68(5),533–548. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-018-0836-y
White, W. (2014). Slaying the dragon: The history of addiction treatment and recovery in America (2nd ed.). Chestnut Health Systems
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Disclosures and Declarations
There are no sources of funding, competing financial or non-financial interests, required ethics committee approval, nor informed consent related to the author’s work.
Additional information
Publisher’s Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
Springer Nature or its licensor holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
About this article
Cite this article
Waters, S. For Every Order There Is a Disorder: Augustine and Criminalized Care in the Drug Court Model of Addiction Treatment. Pastoral Psychol 71, 719–734 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-022-01028-w
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-022-01028-w