"People, Places, and Things": Ideology and Its Role in the Construction of the Judicial Imaginary

Background: Mental Health Courts (MHCs) are non-adversarial models that serve people with serious mental illness (SMI) in the criminal legal system. These interventions incorporate community-based treatment providers into a collaborative process with traditional courtroom personnel (i.e. judges, attorneys, and probation officers) to facilitate treatment and supervision for defendants. In part, they represent the penal state’s response to forty years of harsh punishment, serving as rehabilitative alternatives to incarceration. While many empirical studies have examined MHCs’ effectiveness, few have ethnographically investigated courtroom dynamics that realize MHCs’ rehabilitative aims. This study fills this gap by ethnographically investigating how MHCs construct and deploy notions of rehabilitation in an era of punitive penal governance. Rather than deconstruct the legal and psychiatric categories of MHCs, such as criminality, addiction, and SMI, this study pays special attention to how these categories are ideologically constructed vis-à-vis race, class, and gender, assigned meaning, and targeted in the judicial process.

Methods:  Data for this study come from 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork at two MHCs in Cook County Illinois. Primary data sources include: 1) observations of over 1000 court hearings on approximately 100 MHC defendant cases, 2) a corpus of official court transcripts from these court hearings, and 3) ethnographic interviews with MHC defendants, their friends, family members, and case managers, and the official MHC court personnel. Grounded theory and discourse analysis were employed as analytical techniques.

Results: A common discourse circulated by defendants is a “people, places, and things” interpretive frame that emerges from American self-help drug programs.  While this frame has utility for defendants for navigating and making sense of social and ecological relapse triggers, when MHCs take it up, they deploy it in ways that incorporate ideologies of race, gender, and class. These ideologies work in tandem with a risk-based conception of addiction, wherein all defendants are configured as “criminal addicts” who are perpetually prone to drug use. This construction justifies increased monitoring and paternalistic control by MHCs, often resulting in material instability for defendants due to the court’s practice of moving defendants from perceived places of risk (i.e. their home and communities) or discouraging employment. For women, their social relationships and home life are interrogated and surveilled differently than men, and this difference centers on gendered ideas of autonomy and dependency. With respect to race, MHCs deploy colorblind narratives of black ghettoization to make decisions about where appropriate, risk-free communities are worthy of moving defendants to and from for treatment. Entire swaths of the segregated city, namely the predominantly black neighborhoods of Chicago, are relegated as undifferentiated communities full of danger and criminality.

Conclusion: This study demonstrates how well-intentioned community-based alternatives to incarceration are not free from various ideological formations. This implies that rehabilitative programs must critically engage and remedy how gendered, racialized, and class-based social arrangements serve as central anchors to the penal state and in tandem with stereotypes of illness and addiction.  When left unchecked, these ideologies can lead to increased stigmatization and marginalization, paternalistic control, and material instability despite rehabilitative intent.