The New Dependency: Punishing Drug Using Women

• In Event: 477 - Section on Crime, Law, and Deviance Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable: Section on Crime, Law, and Deviance Roundtables. Table 01. Punishment and Incarceration 1

Abstract

This paper investigates recent, influential discourses about the “dependency” of poor and marginalized women in the criminal justice system. A substantial literature documents the importance of gendered and racialized moral rhetoric about women’s dependency to debates leading up to welfare reform. In the penal system, dependency is being reconfigured from an aversion to work and irresponsible childbearing into a considerably more therapeutic meaning, dominated by “codependency” discourse. The idea that women’s addiction is fed by an insufficiently-individuated, dependent self is widespread therapeutic culture, suggesting the important influence of addiction discourses on how we punish. The use of the codependency framework in correctional policies, reform discourses, and institutions for women is producing new forms of gendered citizenship. Through an ethnographic comparison of two residential addiction treatment programs for women, one in the penal-welfare system and the other in the healthcare system, this research shows how in gendered therapeutic discourses are blended with existing racialized discourses about poverty and crime. This new meaning of dependency rendered penal treatment more controlling and stigmatizing while also delegitimizing women’s material needs. As a result, this therapeutic model shapes the way the justice system addresses inequality.

Author

• Allison R. McKim, Bard College