Feminized Need and Racialized Risk: Accentuated Gender and Color-blind Racism in a Midwestern Drug Court

• In Event: Essential Contexts: Privilege and Oppression in Crime and Justice

Abstract

Drug courts have proliferated in recent decades. This study uses ethnographic and interview methods to analyze how race and gender play out in one large Midwestern drug court. In total we spent over 130 hours in the courtroom, conducted individual semi-structured interviews with 20+ drug court clients and most staff. We find that riskiness or neediness dominated the course of their clients’ treatment, and that neediness was strongly and overtly associated with female gender, while riskiness seemed to be unintentionally but equally highly associated with non-whiteness and men. Following from this logic, women (especially white) were able to succeed in drug court by dealing with their needs through therapy and by performing good motherhood, while men succeeded through finding and maintaining work, becoming productive responsible citizens. At the intersections of race and gender one characteristic typically trumped the other depending on how a drug court client was able to portray him/herself as fitting into their respective ideal role. Moreover, while non-whiteness was covertly associated with risk, the extent to which men of color faced huge disadvantage in the labor market was notably suppressed in drug court discourse, reproducing the essentialization of “riskiness” onto black bodies rather than the wider society.

Authors

• Veronica L. Horowitz, University of Minnesota

• Teresa Gowan, University of Minnesota