Recovery as Punishment: Interrogating Carceral Power and Racialized Control in the 12-Step Paradigm

• In Event: Carceral Studies

Abstract

Substance use recovery has been deployed as a technology of the carceral state, yet criminology has failed to truly scrutinize “recovery” as yet another punishment system. 12-step recovery, placed in prisons in the 1950s, is the dominant form of recovery for incarcerated people and is often forced/required for people who are arrested for drug-related “crimes.” I argue that 12-step recovery demonstrates that the court does not only distribute punishment in terms of crime but ensures the ongoing nature of capitalist social reproduction. Temperance and 12-step hegemony has dominated the culture of substance use recovery in the United States for the better part of two centuries. AA’s hegemonic ideals include the group’s focus on abstinence and its belief that sobriety entails the achievement of heteronormative productive bourgeois citizenship. In turn, I draw from critical carceral studies to analyze how the carceral state has aided in upholding and creating the 12-step hegemony. I then argue that required 12-step recovery participation is a forced punishment that the carceral state uses to continually reinforce racist notions of drug criminality and white respectability by placing the worth of recovery on the substance user’s ability to conform to white heteropatriarchal capitalist modes of being.

Author

• Elizabeth Holden, University of Tennessee, Knoxville