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Short abstract:

This ethnography examines how carceral logics bound up in therapeutic jurisprudence initiatives, complicate caring as-well-as-possible in one residential alcohol and other drug rehabilitation service in Eastern Australia.

Long abstract:

Alcohol and other drug residential rehabilitation in Australia, and elsewhere, increasingly operates at the intersection of “carceral” and “therapeutic” organisational logics, with a growing incorporation of “therapeutic jurisprudence” into community-based treatment settings.

With a focus on the tensions that follow from these carceral logics, this paper draws on ethnographic data and conceptual tools from science and technology studies (Mol 2008;Law 2004) to analyse collective care relations and practices at Open Roads, a residential alcohol and other drug therapeutic community in Eastern Australia.

Caring for and with collectives (of subjects, animals, knowledges, atmospheres, spaces etc.) when it worked well at Open Roads, enacted rules, knowledges and categories in fluid and open ways, enabling people to participate in changing living conditions in accordance with their needs and preferences. Yet choreographing care in response to imperatives of therapeutic jurisprudence often resulted in compromises and limitations in the practice of care as-well-as-possible. While offering respite from prison incarceration for some, enacting quasi-carceral regimes of care placed pressure on care participants to choreograph disparate and dissonant care imperatives in ways that hinged on tighter disciplinary regimes, therapeutic responsibilisation and enacting greater vulnerability and institutional dependency.

Staying with the trouble of residential rehabilitation today we argue, requires adequate flexibility and resourcing to attend to, and ongoing assessment of, the needs of various collectives bound up in care relations. For policy makers, this requires a more direct accounting of alignments and incongruities between the needs of people entering care from criminal legal settings and other community members.