coerced treatment

Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema crdbronx at erols.com
Tue Jun 12 08:59:04 PDT 2001


Moreover, it is simplistic to assert that only therapy "freely" chosen is potentially effective. What drives people into treatment even when it is not a law-enforcement process is often some sort of feeling that one copes with reality so ineffectively that one needs help. The coercive mechanism of the state is another dimension of reality. In fact, there are therapeutic theories that can take these exigencies into account.

Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema

Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:


> >So,
> >
> >> The question, said Glasser, is do incremental
> >> reforms
> >> like
> >> coerced treatment get you closer to your goal? Not
> >> necessarily,
> >> he answered. "I worry that Prop. 36 will undermine
> >> our
> >> fundamental principles and reinforce greater social
> >> controls. In
> >> the long run," Glasser concluded, "coerced treatment
> >> takes us
> >> further from our principles."
> >
> >Or, in Foucauldian political terms, coerced treatment
> >is *not* a reform, but rather a more refined technique
> >of social control. What's Ira Glasser's story? And
> >does he read Michel Foucault?
> >
> >Alec
>
> Or rather Foucault's criticism of the welfare state owes less to Marx
> than Weber & liberalism -- hence the resemblance between him and a
> Glasser at times -- though Foucault rejects the liberal conception of
> rights-bearing persons. I think we can & should argue against (A)
> drug treatment as an alternative sentence to imprisonment & say that
> (B) decriminalizing drugs & offering free drug treatment as a
> service, not a sentence, are better political reforms. I'm not sure,
> however, that Foucault would have thought that (B) would make the
> state any less offensively "therapeutic" than (A), for Foucault's
> criticism of biopolitics & governmentality applies indiscriminately
> both to (A) and (B). Based upon a Foucauldian critique, one might as
> well say that mass immunization of children is an instance of the
> egregiously "therapeutic state," a sign of the growth of biopolitics
> & governmentality; recall that _Discipline and Punish_ begins the
> chapter titled "Panopticism" with an analysis of the
> seventeenth-century management of the plague.
>
> Yoshie



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