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