Damaged and Deserving: On Care in a Veteran Treatment Court

ABSTRACT

In this article, I describe the life-sustaining but inherently coercive labor of care in a veteran treatment court (VTC), a “helping court” in which veterans charged with less-severe offenses can avoid jail by completing a 12- to 18-month therapeutic and rehabilitative program. This privileged medico-legal status is intertwined with the moral economy of military service in the contemporary US and resonates with the politics of American war-making. I argue that the caring work of the court helps produce the subject of veteran disorder, simultaneously enabling life-sustaining practices and constraining the forms of life that veteran offenders can inhabit.

KEYWORDS:

• Biopolitics
• care
• disability
• mental illness
• treatment courts
• US military veterans

Acknowledgments

I am indebted to the trust, generosity, and insight of my interlocutors, acquaintances, and friends in Hullford. Thanks to my hosts and audiences for versions of this work presented at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Phillips University Marburg, Bucknell University, University of Chicago, and University of California San Francisco. Special thanks to Paul Brodwin and Jess Cooper for valuable discussions about treatment courts, to the anonymous reviewers who provided crucial feedback for this article, and to Aimi Hamraie, O.A. Lindsey, Rachael Pomerantz, Laura Stark, and Zoë Wool for their input, support, and comradeship.

Notes

1. A soldier of any of the various grades of sergeant with direct responsibility over junior soldiers and unit operations.

2. The protocol for this project was approved by the author’s university institutional review board, and it includes measures to ensure the informed consent, confidentiality, and privacy of research participants. All subjects are referred to by pseudonyms, and certain identifying details have been omitted, altered, or composited in the interest of protecting subjects’ identities.

3. The abbreviation “VA” is used to refer to the Veterans Health Administration, which provides veteran healthcare, the Veterans Benefit Administration, which rates disability and pays pensions, and the entire edifice of state veteran care.

4. I am indebted to Reviewer 1 for this description of the court’s merged logics and multiple subjectification of its participants.

5. As Wool (2015) points out, despite their acknowledged bodily and psychological impairments and their official classification as such, many veterans do not take “disability” as an identity marker.

6. A 2008 RAND Corporation study indicates that over 60 percent of post-9/11 veterans reported symptoms either of PTSD or of adjacent conditions including depression, anxiety, or substance use (Tanielian and Jaycox 2008). More recent estimates of the rate of PTSD diagnosis in post-9/11 veterans suggest prevalence ranging from 12 to 20 percent (Dursa et al. 2014), and a lifetime prevalence of over 30 percent.

Additional information

Funding

This research described was supported by a Wenner-Gren Foundation Post-PhD Research Grant and a Vanderbilt University Research Scholar Faculty Development Grant.

Notes on contributors

Ken MacLeish

Ken MacLeish is associate professor of Medicine, Health & Society and Anthropology at Vanderbilt University. He is the author of Making War at Fort Hood: Life and Uncertainty in a Military Community (2013).