Piehowski Victoria
Department of Sociology and Criminology, University at Buffalo, SUNY, Buffalo, NY, USA.
Soc Sci Med. 2025 Sep;380:118170. doi: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2025.118170. Epub 2025 May 9.
Criminal court actors engage in medicalization as they negotiate the balance of punitive and rehabilitative responses in their work, particularly in cases of low-level drug crime. Often, however, these legal actors regard violent crime as untreatable. This paper examines an exception to this assemblage of practice and policy: Veterans Treatment Courts (VTCs). VTCs combine judges, prosecutors, public defenders, and Veterans Affairs' (VA) professionals to provide treatment-based supervision in lieu of incarceration. In Minnesotan VTCs, court actors regard violent crime as treatable-for this population. Using interview data, I analyze how court actors medicalize violence as they legitimate veterans' eligibility for the court and design their supervision. I find that court actors establish trauma as an institutional logic in ways that enable them to negotiate contradictions of contemporary rehabilitative punishment. This institutional logic is patterned by two core assumptions: first, that trauma presents a latent risk for crime, necessitating the extensive surveillance of this resource-intensive court; and second, that veteran trauma is particularly distinct from that of others in the criminal justice system, thereby justifying the provision of sentencing incentives and treatment resources to someone who would otherwise be deemed a violent offender. Viewing this dynamic as a process of stratified medicalization, I show how conflicts in contemporary criminal justice politics shape medicalization processes.
刑事法庭工作人员在工作中权衡惩罚性和改造性回应的平衡时会进行医学化处理，尤其是在低级别毒品犯罪案件中。然而，这些法律工作人员通常认为暴力犯罪是无法治疗的。本文研究了这种实践和政策组合的一个例外情况：退伍军人治疗法庭（VTCs）。退伍军人治疗法庭将法官、检察官、公设辩护人以及退伍军人事务部（VA）的专业人员联合起来，提供基于治疗的监管，以替代监禁。在明尼苏达州的退伍军人治疗法庭中，法庭工作人员认为暴力犯罪对于这一群体是可以治疗的。利用访谈数据，我分析了法庭工作人员在使退伍军人具备进入法庭的资格并设计其监管措施时，是如何将暴力医学化的。我发现法庭工作人员以这样一种方式将创伤确立为一种制度逻辑，即这种逻辑使他们能够协商当代改造性惩罚中的矛盾。这种制度逻辑由两个核心假设构成：第一，创伤是犯罪的潜在风险，这就需要对这个资源密集型法庭进行广泛监督；第二，退伍军人的创伤与刑事司法系统中其他人的创伤特别不同，因此有理由向一个否则会被视为暴力罪犯的人提供量刑激励和治疗资源。将这种动态过程视为分层医学化的过程，我展示了当代刑事司法政治中的冲突是如何塑造医学化过程的。
