Judges as therapists and therapists as judges: the collision of judicial and therapeutic roles in drug treatment courts

Abstract

This paper explores the implications of the expansion of judicial and therapeutic roles in a drug treatment court (DTC) in Canada. Issues that are raised are: how the courtroom is framed as a therapeutic space where public appearances by participants are part of the therapeutic process; how judges have taken on therapeutic practices, effectively compromising their traditional role as neutral arbiter; how certain women resisted therapeutic interventions by judges and felt they received harsher punishments than men; and how treatment counselors in DTCs are given powers of enforcement over their clients. The collision of judicial and therapeutic roles in the DTC results in negative consequences for individuals in the specialized courts. Specifically, DTC participants are expected to engage in a therapeutic relationship with their treatment counselors and the court; however, their right to confidentiality is withheld, and their treatment counselors act as agents for the court.

Keywords:

• drug treatment courts
• drug courts
• treatment
• judiciary
• gender
• therapy

Acknowledgements

I gratefully acknowledge the participants in the Ottawa drug treatment court, the financial support of this work by the Ontario Graduate Scholarship and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, and my PhD committee members Drs. Colleen Anne Dell, Susan C. Boyd and Neil Gerlach. I would also like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their comments. I acknowledge that the methodology and some of the data from this project are borrowed from the work of Dawn Moore funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. I wish to thank Dr. Moore for the use of her data and recognize that she and I have not collaborated in any way on this project. The methodology was influenced by observational techniques used while working for Dr. Moore. The development of the critical ethnography approach, the textual analysis methods, and the interview guides were developed independently.