Explorations in the Carceral Archipelago: Attitudes Towards Drug-Testing in Criminal Justice and Non-Criminal Justice Settings

• In Event: Understanding Criminal Justice Workplaces

Abstract

Urine, hair, blood, and saliva testing is ubiquitous in community corrections as a means of determining compliance with abstinence-focused conditions of supervision. Increasingly, non-criminal justice employers are standardizing drug testing during pre-employment screening. A smaller number of companies utilize drug testing for ongoing employee monitoring and surveillance. The pervasiveness of drug testing is suggestive of Foucault’s (1977) “carceral archipelago” (p. 298), whereby panoptic surveillance, criminalization and control insidiously spread from the penitentiary and community corrections to the social body.
This qualitative study seeks to understand the experience of drug testing for individuals involved in community corrections and private businesses. Specifically, 30 semi-structured interviews were conducted with staff and clients in a state community corrections agency and employees working for national retail chains. Key themes explored included drug testing as deterrence, disciplinary repercussions, opportunities for treatment, and evasion techniques to generate false negatives. The role of the rehabilitative ideal in the carceral archipelago is discussed.

Authors

• Talya Davis-Day, University of New Haven

• Kevin Barnes-Ceeney, University of New Haven