Probation and State Care

Over the past half-century, the US penal state has grown to “mass” scale, expanding the breadth and depth of its intervention into daily life, particularly in poor communities of color (Western Reference Western2006; Garland Reference Garland2012). At the same time, punishment became increasingly neoliberal, emphasizing mass containment, control, and management over individualized diagnosis and rehabilitation (Feeley and Simon Reference Feeley and Simon1992; O’Malley Reference O’Malley1992; Garland Reference Garland2012). Against the backdrop of widespread attacks on the legitimacy of anti-poverty initiatives, welfare institutions shifted as well, with cash aid programs becoming more meager, surveillance oriented, and disciplinary (Soss, Fording, and Schram Reference Soss, Fording and Schram2011; Garland Reference Garland2012; Sheely Reference Sheely2020). The transformation of the social safety net amidst rising inequality and the expansion of punishment produced a new set of care needs that the criminal legal system came to manage.

Rather than address such needs directly, the state increasingly devolved responsibility for the task of “rehabilitation” onto private and non-profit service providers (Miller Reference Miller2014). Addiction management became a primary target of these programs, reconfiguring the link between punishment and welfare (McKim Reference McKim2017) and spurring a network of therapeutic institutions designed to discipline and regulate addicts. These included drug treatment courts (Nolan Reference Nolan2003; Tiger Reference Tiger2012; Kaye Reference Kaye2019; Horowitz and Gowan Reference Horowitz and Gowan2022), prison-based drug treatment (Haney Reference Haney2010; McCorkel Reference McCorkel2013; Sue Reference Sue2019), in-patient rehabilitation centers (Gowan and Whetstone Reference Gowan and Whetstone2012; McKim Reference McKim2017; Whetstone and Gowan Reference Whetstone and Gowan2017), out-patient support groups like Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous (Sered and Norton-Hawk Reference Sered and Norton-Hawk2011), and sober living or halfway houses (Martin Reference Martin2021; Miller Reference Miller2021). This expansion has meant that many of the services and treatment programs the most marginalized Americans receive are now imbricated with criminal legal system contact (Miller and Stuart Reference Miller and Stuart2017; Brydolf-Horwitz and Beckett Reference Brydolf-Horwitz and Beckett2021).

Probation serves as a key hub in this system of addiction governance, deputizing “satellite state” agencies to take part in the treatment and monitoring of individuals’ substance use (Haney Reference Haney2010). Among the three million US adults on probation in 2020, a quarter were on probation for drug offenses alone, with another 11 percent on supervision for a driving while impaired (DWI)/driving under the influence (DUI) charge (Kaeble Reference Kaeble2021). As the war on drugs expanded and the labor market for unionized low-barrier employment collapsed, community supervision became increasingly oriented around detecting, treating, and punishing drug use (Simon Reference Simon1993; Schuman, forthcoming). Today, in addition to abstaining from alcohol and substance use, adults on probation are typically required to meet a long list of conditions, including avoiding contact with other adults with criminal records, not leaving the county without permission, living in an approved residence, finding or maintaining employment, completing required programming, avoiding police contact, and reporting regularly. Violating any of these terms (a “technical violation”)—including a positive drug test—constitutes grounds for revocation to jail or prison (Klingele Reference Klingele2013; Doherty Reference Doherty2016; Phelps Reference Phelps, Jeffrey and Bradley2018a).

While probation officers wield significant punitive power, the field also retains some of its history as a social work-oriented institution tasked with reintegration (Robinson Reference Robinson2002; Phelps Reference Phelps2018b; McNeill Reference McNeill2020). For example, Hennepin County, where we situate our study, describes its approach in policy documents as “client-centered,” with an “emphasis on supporting the individual’s sobriety goals” (see Gokey Reference Gokey2021, 3; Johnson Reference Johnson2021). So too do people on supervision and probation officers themselves construe the experience of probation as one of assistance (at least in part), a dynamic that Michelle Phelps and Ebony Ruhland (Reference Phelps and Ruhland2021) describe as coercive care.

From the perspective of probation officers (and, at times, people on supervision), even the most punitive aspects of probation can be construed as “care”—with probation officers requiring treatment programs as a response to violations, framing the completion of services as a way to show “accountability,” and threatening incarceration to coerce compliance with treatment regimes (Phelps and Ruhland Reference Phelps and Ruhland2021). Thus, coercion and care are understood not as competing goals of supervision but, rather, as intimately interwoven strands that collectively produce effective treatment (Burns and Peyrot Reference Burns and Peyrot2003; Paik Reference Paik2009). As Robert Werth (Reference Werth2013, 219) outlines in the context of parole, the other major form of community supervision, the punitive ideology common among probation officers constructs “paroled subjects as always precarious and as responsible for their own reformation.” This “tough love” treatment thus responsibilizes adults on probation to reform themselves, a project that has become increasingly enmeshed with efforts to manage and punish substance use.

Navigating Strong-arm Sobriety

Studying drug treatment programs in a Midwestern city, Teresa Gowan and Sarah Whetstone (Reference Gowan and Whetstone2012) develop the concept of “strong-arm rehab” to characterize the punitive and degrading treatment programs that often serve justice-involved adults (see also Whetstone and Gowan Reference Whetstone and Gowan2011). These programs, the authors argue, understand their clients through the trope of the “criminal addict,” reducing complex biological patterns of behavior and structural inequality to the “criminal thinking” of disordered adults. Poverty, in this formulation, is a result of users’ moral failings rather than the other way around (Kaye Reference Kaye2019). As a result, such programs focus on character reformation, “fixing” problematic thoughts, desires, and lifestyles. As Kenneth MacLeish (Reference MacLeish2020) argues in the context of veterans treatment courts, such programs thus inherently circumscribe the parameters and goals of “care.”

This neoliberal conversion of state failures into individuals’ “bad choices” pervades institutions in the “murky middle” of the penal-welfare continuum, including in-prison and community-based treatment programs, half-way houses and day reporting centers, community supervision, and re-entry and employment programs (Brydolf-Horwitz and Beckett Reference Brydolf-Horwitz and Beckett2021). In these (largely residential) sites, quasi-government agents produce practices of intimate governance, including “gut-level” therapeutic techniques and psychoeducational strategies (McKim Reference McKim2017). Allison McKim (Reference McKim2017, 9) calls this process “governing through addiction,” arguing that “the logics and techniques from the addiction recovery field underpin how we think about and act on social relations.” In this way, addiction becomes the central framework for understanding and acting upon a wide swath of social problems.

This remaking of the self is often experienced differently across race, gender, sexuality, and other axes of difference. While men in substance-disorder treatment programs are often pushed toward job readiness programs to become the “average Joe taxpayer” (Gowan and Whetstone Reference Gowan and Whetstone2012; see also Halushka Reference Halushka2020), women are more typically instructed to resolve flawed desires, emotions, and family relationships, sometimes with the additional goal of workforce participation (Haney Reference Haney2010; Wyse Reference Wyse2013; Leverentz Reference Leverentz2014; McKim Reference McKim2014, Reference McKim2017; Gurusami Reference Gurusami2017; Kerrison Reference Kerrison2018a). Programs are also racialized, attempting to mold Black and Latino/a/x populations into a white middle-class norm, placing responsibility for the effects of racism onto racialized people while reading (and treating) white people’s drug use through more sympathetic medical lenses (Miller Reference Miller2014; Gurusami Reference Gurusami2017; McKim Reference McKim2017; Whetstone and Gowan Reference Whetstone and Gowan2017; Dagenhardt Reference Dagenhardt2021; Lindsay and Vuolo Reference Lindsay and Vuolo2021).

We draw on this literature to describe the logics of a different site within the penal welfare continuum. Rather than focus on the techniques of intimate governance, we examine the lived experiences of being caught and shifted across the penal-welfare continuum. In doing so, we explore the gaps between how governing strategies imagine those under supervision and how those subjected to that governance perceive their own circumstances, identities, and struggles (Michener, SoRelle, and Thurston Reference Michener, SoRelle and Thurston2022). Fergus McNeill (Reference McNeill2018), in his study of probation in Scotland, argues that this kind of misreading constitutes its own particular pain of supervision. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s concept of the panopticon, McNeill (Reference McNeill2018, 209) describes the self-reclamation project of community corrections as maloptical: “[T]he subject is seen badly, is seen as bad and is projected and represented as bad” (on misrecognition, see also Rios Reference Rios2011). As community supervision imposes the gaze of the state, people come to see themselves through the lens of their probation officer (or the department and court system writ large) in order to navigate the demands and threats of supervision. As Forrest Stuart (Reference Stuart2016) describes in the context of policing, this internalization of the state gaze (or becoming “cop-wise” in his work) has not only social-psychological pains but also real material consequences, as people isolate from the people and places that might bring scrutiny from the state (see also Brayne Reference Brayne2014; Fader Reference Fader2021).

We bring this work on carceral rehab and the malopticon of the state together to develop the concept of “strong-arm sobriety” or the coercive care meted out to adults on supervision to contain, manage, and punish drug and alcohol consumption. We find that sobriety demands saturate the probation experience—from services and treatment, surveillance and compliance monitoring, to sanctions. Further, strong-arm sobriety is maloptical, misreading the multiple and complex forces leading to substance use and punishment through the lens of the racialized “criminal addict,” in the process misrecognizing and mistreating the people subject to its control. This maloptic dynamic of probation is not just driven by individual relationships with probation officers but also structured through the rules, protocols, and culture of the probation department and the conditions imposed by the courts. Thus, in our analysis, we describe the effects of strong-arm sobriety not in terms of simple dyadic relationships between officers and supervisees but, rather, in terms of how individuals experienced this system of control more holistically.

A Chance to “Get Back on Track”: Treatment

As noted above, many of our interviewees experienced significant challenges across several domains, including difficulty finding and affording housing, accessing medical care for lengthy untreated health conditions, meeting basic food needs, and struggles with substance use. In this context, supportive services or assistance from probation was often welcomed, with over three-quarters of our participants evaluating probation as “somewhat helpful,” “helpful,” or “very helpful.” ^{Footnote 4} Yet there were no statistically significant difference in perceptions of probation’s helpfulness across race, age, or gender categories. For example, 31 percent of women, compared to 27 percent of men, rated probation as “very” helpful, while 25 percent of women and 23 percent of men selected “not at all helpful.”

Instead, what mattered was more qualitative—how much participants felt that probation had helped them to change their lives. For participants who described probation as helpful, the most common reason was that it helped them to get and stay sober, in part through the coercive motivation of drug testing (described below) and in part to access services. Similarly, for those who described probation as “not at all helpful,” their responses to the open-ended prompt often described their frustration at not getting linked to services and assistance. Indeed, as participants spoke about the “care” of probation, it became clear that the supportive resources on offer were often curated around addiction, ranging from in-patient rehab to outpatient services and peer support. Many of our participants had been required by the court to complete a “Rule 25” assessment, in which a health professional determines if an individual needs substance use treatment, the level of treatment they require, and their financial eligibility to receive state funding for treatment. Probation officers could also order Rule 25 assessments if, for example, a client failed a routine drug test. These assessments often became court or probation mandates to attend treatment. In turn, probation officers would then monitor compliance with treatment regimes.

This focus on substance-use treatment as the main form of care created tension across our sample. On the one hand, the shuttling of probationers into sobriety services, including in-patient rehab, could generate periods of respite and address real needs. Treatment-related housing and programming provided some of our participants with a safe shelter after periods of incarceration, homelessness, and distressing drug use. Beyond shelter and treatment, rehab sometimes served as an access point to a wide array of additional services, such as individual psychotherapy. On the other hand, these services were delivered within the coercive structure of probation (and the dictates of carceral rehab programs). Accordingly, substance-use treatment services were sometimes perceived by participants as an intrusive, disruptive, and demanding mandate and an additional node of surveillance. In addition, for those who reported benefiting from services, such periods of respite were time limited to the length of the program. Many described leaving such periods of respite in the same precarious circumstances in which they had entered (see also Halushka Reference Halushka2020; Martin Reference Martin2021; Miller Reference Miller2021).

The experiences of Donna and Carl illustrate both ends of this spectrum, providing a window into the various ways in which people on probation managed the fault lines of strong-arm sobriety. For Donna, a forty-three-year-old Black woman, the supportive social services that came with probation enabled her to address long-standing issues of drug use and trauma. Donna had an extensive history of legal contact, having been arrested over twenty times in different states before her current case. At the time of her arrest in Minnesota, she had been jumping from state to state, committing bank fraud, and engaging in sex work to make ends meet. After starting this term of probation, however, Donna finally gained access to services that allowed her to stabilize, starting with in-patient rehab and then later sober housing, where she was residing at the time of the interview. Donna described the powerful impact of this programming on her life:

For Donna, “going through probation” was worth it to address her struggles. Donna talked about her past experiences of sexual abuse, explaining that drug use became a way of dealing with it or, as she puts it, “to not deal with it.” Stably housed and receiving psychotherapy to address this long history of trauma, Donna emphasized that the supportive services she received were critical to her recovery. She said the combination of medical care, drug treatment, psychiatric care, and Narcotics Anonymous meetings has made her more “aware” and “balanced.” Like participants in Kimberly Sue’s (Reference Sue2019) study of drug treatment in prison, Donna utilized the trauma lens in ways that were empowering: “I’ve been through a lot in my life where it’s hindered me, but it’s also made me stronger.”

As Donna explained the benefits of care during probation, she minimized the role of the coercive apparatus regulating her recovery. Indeed, she gave urinalyses (UAs) at her treatment center, and so the conditions of probation appeared to coincide with a larger program of addiction recovery rather than feeling like a separate coercive burden. She was not even sure if the Narcotics Anonymous meetings she attended were mandated as part of her probation—she attended them voluntarily, finding them beneficial for her own goals of maintaining sobriety. All told, Donna’s evaluation of strong-arm sobriety case management involved her own distinctive alignment of coercion and care, in which the coercion of probation appeared justified through the value of care. She went so far as to state that she was “glad” that she was arrested in Minnesota—the resources that came along with it enabled her to both make sense of her history of trauma and perceive herself as moving in the right direction. Yet, in her focus on the positive impacts of care, Donna repeatedly noted the novelty of its accessibility (“I just want to say … I was never offered treatment”) despite a long and arduous history of criminal legal involvement. This emphasis highlights the taken-for-granted yet fundamental condition of this care: that, as hubs for services, penal institutions simultaneously act as their gatekeepers, controlling and managing the access points. The arbitrary nature of this gatekeeping process leaves some individuals, like Donna, weathering decades of arrests to find help. Poignantly, though Donna identifies her experiences of trauma as central to her repeat run-ins with the law, it was her identification as an addict that gained her access to the services that finally helped her to address this history.

Most of our participants were more ambivalent than Donna, both appreciating and resenting this blend of rehabilitation and punishment. Onerous probation conditions often cross-cut other obligations from employers, government assistance institutions, and social service providers in ways that made accessing these resources impossible or nearly so. This meant that the “care” of rehabilitative programs often caused a great deal of stress and financial, emotional, and time demands (Phelps and Ruhland Reference Phelps and Ruhland2021). In addition, for participants who had traversed this continuum several times, the push toward rehabilitative institutions was a recurring process, one they were aware was ill-fated from the outset. For these participants, care was not a turning point but, rather, another hurdle to overcome (see also Halushka Reference Halushka2020).

Carl, a sixty-year-old Black man who had spent much of his adult life in prison or on probation, spoke pointedly to this bind. When asked about his housing difficulties, Carl explained how his supervision conditions clashed with the complex public assistance eligibility standards in the county. At the time of our interview, he was serving probation and parole terms concurrently and living in a halfway house. He had overstayed the allowed time in the halfway house, and, although the director had agreed to let him stay temporarily, Carl was in a frantic search for affordable housing. Carl’s housing options were limited because of several chronic health conditions—including Hepatitis C, back pain, and schizophrenia—which had been exacerbated by his recent stint in prison and now made employment unattainable. Due to these issues, Carl received nine hundred dollars of monthly supplemental security income support from the state. However, these funds went directly to his halfway house and would do so until he left. Thus, Carl only had two hundred dollars per month in general assistance funds, which went to his cell phone bill, personal hygiene products, public transportation costs (needed for regular check-ins with his probation officer), and food. One local housing program, which could have been a pathway to stable housing, required its recipients to be homeless for fifteen days in order to be eligible for its services. But being without an address was a violation of his supervision terms, and he did not trust his probation officer to grant him any leniency. Tracking down additional resources became difficult as his halfway house only allowed him to go to three places per day, and Carl had many supervision requirements, including attending Narcotics Anonymous meetings and participating in “prosocial volunteer activities” that, according to him, took up many of his opportunities to leave.

Despite these many cross-cutting burdens and restrictions, and the centrality of housing concerns for Carl, his probation officer was focused on substance use and wanted him to go to in-patient treatment. When Carl asked his probation officer for help with other issues like his housing predicament, his probation officer replied that it was not his job to help with those kinds of things. For overburdened probation officers, sending a client experiencing homelessness to rehab makes sense: it removes them from a dangerous and precarious setting and provides a structure that in some ways supplants supervision. Yet Carl’s struggles for long-term stability had little to do with substance use. He reported not using in three years, and a recent Rule 25 assessor found that he did not need substance-use treatment. Carl was so frustrated that he considered going back to prison to serve the last eight months of his charge, telling us: “That’s the reality of a guy getting out of prison…. I’m thinking of just going back. Just going back and doing the rest of my time because … nobody’s helping me. And then I’m being hindered.”

While Donna articulated a hopeful ideal of probation as intervention, Carl’s story represents a common narrative among those who had already run through the institutional circuits of coercive treatment, finding few sustainable off-ramps. For these participants, while services could be a useful access point to resources like (often temporary) housing and therapy, there were clear limits to this care. Critically, the benefits associated with treatment are often strictly time-limited, and participants were well aware that a discriminatory housing market and struggles for sobriety awaited them at the end. As another participant summarized, “[y]ou’re in a bubble when you’re there. They do everything for ya.” Once outside the “bubble” of in-patient care, participants described steep challenges in meeting their own needs and those imposed by probation. Carl’s frustration, and his contemplation of returning to prison, highlight how much the shuttling processes of strong-arm sobriety could feel like a dead-end rather than a transition to stability.

“Now I’m Drinking All the Time”: Testing

Probation officers used their authority to demand regular drug and alcohol testing of the people in our sample, making the (often fraught) experiences of traveling to testing sites and providing samples a common thread across the probation experience. A routine probation condition was the “color wheel,” a system of assigning random drug tests, with a frequency determined by the risk level (or “color”) of the participant at any given time. Two-thirds of our sample (66 percent) reported to probation once a month or less, while another 8 percent had no reporting requirements, and 26 percent reported more frequently (up to once per day). Every visit could entail a drug test on the spot; others were required to routinely test with breathalyzer machines that they carried on their person at all times. While the frequency of testing varied from person to person, the inconveniences and frustrations of testing were a frequent conversation. Yet participants’ description of the value (or lack thereof) of the practice varied substantially. As described above, the majority of our sample had struggled with substance use. So too did a majority report that probation was at least “somewhat” helpful. For these participants, drug testing could at times be experienced as a form of coercive motivation as they came to internalize the label of a criminal addict in need of external regulation (Phelps and Ruhland Reference Phelps and Ruhland2021). On the other hand, testing was simultaneously a demanding and intrusive burden, which sometimes misread participants’ needs and selves.

Participants who struggled with sobriety on a day-to-day basis often described strong-arm sobriety as a necessary (if painful) form of accountability. Indeed, as noted above, among participants who reported that probation was “helpful” or “very helpful,” this invocation of accountability to deter drug and alcohol use through both testing and treatment was the most common explanation for how probation had helped. For some of these participants, drug testing was an essential part of their accountability structure. Phil, a forty-year-old American Indian man, provided a particularly extreme example of this pattern. Phil had experienced a long stint of addiction before probation and feared relapse. Despite these challenges, he had achieved a measure of stability while on probation, working a minimum-wage service job that allowed him to meet his basic needs. Phil described the color wheel system of random drug tests as critical to “safeguard” his sobriety. He went so far as to ask his probation officer to continue testing after she lifted the requirement, worried that diminished surveillance would threaten his sobriety.

Phil was unusual in the degree to which he embraced testing, but it was not uncommon for our participants (especially men) to describe testing as helping them to achieve and maintain sobriety. Craig, a forty-year-old white man who owned his own construction company, credits his own turning point to a surprise home visit from his probation officer. “We need that discipline,” said Craig, who described his probation officer like a second mom. Craig had been drinking at home when his probation officer knocked on his door and required him to submit to an on-the-spot breathalyzer. While, as a result of this encounter, he now had to wear an ankle monitor that detected alcohol use, he was sanguine when describing the experience, noting that he wished that his previous stint on probation had provided this degree of monitoring. Yet, even for participants like Phil and Craig, who adopted the demands of testing as important to their own self-defined goals, the coercive motivation of testing was time limited. Phil and Craig would eventually finish probation and be forced to navigate sobriety independently. If testing undergirded their sobriety, it would be threatened when probation ended, especially if the circumstances that engendered use had not been addressed. While Craig and Phil had both achieved a measure of economic stability alongside their sobriety, others were not so lucky.

Many participants in our sample resisted the notion that coercive surveillance would lead to greater well-being, particularly vis-à-vis sobriety. In some cases, this was because participants had gotten sober or had never had, or long since moved past, relapse concerns. For those participants, continued drug testing was an inconvenience and a continual reminder of how they were misrecognized and punished by the system. For others, including many of the roughly one-third of participants (36 percent) who reported continued use of illicit substances at the time of the interview,Footnote ⁵ substance use was not a sign of disorder and/or an addiction that they wanted to fix. For instance, when Jayden, a twenty-three-year-old Black man, was asked if drug or alcohol use had ever been a problem for him, he said: “It’s a problem for them.” Pushing back against probation’s assumptions, Jayden maintained that his substance use (of marijuana) was not criminal and, indeed, positively contributed to his health. Thus, when asked if he did drugs, Jayden replied no because “marijuana is not a drug.” Leaning in closer to the recording device, Jayden reiterated: “Marijuana is not a drug, I repeat.” Like the young men in Victor Rios’s (Reference Rios2011) study, Jayden flaunted his marijuana use as a way of “discredit[ing] the significance of a system which had excluded and punished” him (Rios Reference Rios2012, 53).

For adults like Jayden, the fixation on sobriety was misaligned with their own perceptions of what drove their arrest. Participants who continued to use substances during probation often adopted strategies to manage the demands of strong-arm sobriety and minimize the risk of violation for “dirty” urine. Importantly, this process of becoming “PO [probation officer]-wise” to avoid drug use detection was a high-risk practice of trial and error, fraught with anxiety. It was also a process that could worsen, rather than improve, participants’ well-being. For these participants, strong-arm sobriety probation not only failed to promote rehabilitation but, at times, imperiled their health.

Esperanza, a forty-two-year-old Latina, found herself dealing with increased anxiety and depression after an arrest for drug possession. She had lost her job after the arrest and was struggling to find new employment while balancing childcare for her five-year-old son and mental health issues. Prior to this run-in with the law, she reported using marijuana regularly to cope with daily life stressors—for her, the drug was a form of relaxation, not an addiction. But, once on probation, her probation officer informed her that her tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) levels in monthly drug tests had to come down to avoid a violation. A violation would mean jail time that would take her away from her son. To adjust, Esperanza turned to cigarettes and alcohol. Even though drinking alcohol was also prohibited on probation, she had learned that traces of this substance left her system much more quickly than marijuana and thus were harder to detect. Esperanza told us that she had started “drinking pretty much … every other day” as a result, compromising her overall health. At the end of the interview, Esperanza noted her growing worry about the impact of her increasing alcohol use, feeling trapped between the demands of sobriety and her need for coping mechanisms. Stories like Esperanza’s about compensatory use of other substances to replace drugs were frequent across our sample, with many participants commenting that the disruption of their prior coping practices (especially marijuana use) created immense pressure for them.

In addition to evasions of the testing regiment, other participants dealt with these pressures by curating their presentation of self in alignment with their probation officers’ expectations. Adam, a twenty-nine-year-old white man, had been arrested for fraud while living in a Western state. His arrest followed a series of downturns, including losing his job and being kicked out of the house by his (former) girlfriend. To pick up the pieces, Adam moved to Minnesota to live with family, bringing his probation (transferred to Hennepin County) along with him. This move marked a decisive change in his experience. Even though his arrest was not drug related, his Minnesotan probation officer added a new condition (then standard in the department): regular drug testing. After a few months of testing positive for THC, Adam’s probation officer became certain that he needed in-patient drug treatment. So, she ordered him to undergo a Rule 25 assessment. That assessor found that Adam did not need treatment. Since Adam did not have insurance or the money to pay for rehab on his own, this finding effectively excluded him from in-patient services. Undeterred, Adam’s probation officer reportedly ordered him to get another assessment—and then a third after the second yielded the same result. Framing Adam with the “criminal addict” trope, his probation officer said she would submit a violation if he did not go to treatment. Under intense pressure, Adam checked himself into rehab and got a fourth assessment, which he and the assessor “manipulated” to access and fund treatment. Perhaps not surprisingly, it was Adam who dubbed Minnesota the land of “ten thousand lakes, ten thousand treatment centers,” noting how his supervision had changed.

Though in treatment at the time of the interview, Adam continued to use illicit substances and did not find his substance use problematic. Like Esperanza, Adam was aware he could not use marijuana without detection. He mentioned substituting cocaine and alcohol since they both cleared from drug tests more quickly, a switch he calls “kind of backwards.” Going along with the criminal addict label, however, enabled him to make it through probation without a violation. Asked how he was managing the rehab program, Adam noted that, while “my counselor there is great,” he knew to be “really careful” to keep a consistent presentation of self and obscure continued alcohol and drug use. His deferral to the treatment mandate, not surprisingly, improved his relationship with his probation officer: “She’s gotten more understanding, I guess. I don’t know if that’s because she actually cares or if she just wants me to be in treatment for whatever reason. I guess, like, she’s happy so that makes my life easier [laughs].” While, for Adam, this strategy paid off in the short term, he was delayed in piecing his life together, completing a demanding treatment program that he perceived as unnecessary rather than moving toward other goals.

For participants who did not see themselves or their struggles through the lens of addiction, the demands of testing did little to curb substance use and, in some cases, actually worsened their use and overall health. Those who resisted strong-arm sobriety were required to develop a series of strategies and compensatory techniques, driven by practical knowledge of the UA system and the community of actors that enforced it. These strategies were not foolproof, however, and required a significant and stressful reordering of participants’ day-to-day lives. In Esperanza’s case, the high stakes of looming jail time pushed her to increase her alcohol use, generating new substance use concerns and worsening her depression. Adam, for his part, felt forced into complicity with the criminal addict label and navigated the shuffling processes of strong-arm sobriety by actively seeking out its institutional application. But the costs of coping with strong-arm sobriety manifested in a delay in pulling together the forms of support more relevant to his needs.

“I Caught a Relapse”: Revocation

Across our sample, probation’s emphasis on eradicating substance use created a friction between probation officers and their charges. In the first section, we documented how this conflict could arise in the context of service provision with the miscasting of people’s needs and difficulties, leading to an inappropriate set of resources and a hampered form of case management. It could also snag at the point of testing, in setting expectations around what kinds of substances should be prohibited, tested for, and sanctioned. We turn now to the most punitive edge of strong-arm sobriety, which undergirded much of its stress: revocation. Probation not only served as a hub to services but also to jail or prison, a risk heightened for people with substance-use problems (Galvin, Davidson, and Kleiman Reference Galvin, Davidson and Kleiman2021). The department’s policies and practices, together with the discretion of probation officers, was critical in determining if use was overlooked, treated, or brought into court (Doherty Reference Doherty2016). This risk of revocation was rarely far from the surface in our interviews, as participants described how probation officers linked substance use with personal failings and relied on the threats to compel compliance. Indeed, as the cases below demonstrate, revocation was one of the most powerful ways in which probation officers provided coercive care.

Just over half of participants (58 percent) “agreed” or “strongly agreed” that their experience on probation had been “stressful.” As with helpfulness, however, perceptions of the stressfulness of probation did not reliably correlate with age, race, or gender categories. For example, 58 percent of Black or African American participants replied that they “agreed” or “strongly agreed” with the statement “for the most part, my experience of being on probation has been stressful,” compared to 59 percent of white participants. In contrast, current substance use mattered a great deal: adults who reported using any illicit substances at the time of the interview were twice as likely to “strongly agree” that probation was stressful, compared to their sober peers (50 percent versus 24 percent). Similarly, 47 percent of people who reported drinking alcohol “occasionally” or more at the time of the interview strongly agreed that probation was stressful, compared to only 26 percent among participants who reported no alcohol use.

Even with an “understanding” or “laid-back” probation officer, there was always the threat of removal from the community and the psycho-social pain of being continually assessed as a “risk.” Indeed, even Jayden, who boldly asserted that drug use was a problem “for them” rather than for himself, spoke to this fear: “And I mean I feel like they’ll really send me to prison for weed. That shit is not fair to me. And then if they send me to prison for a year or two, next year they probably legalize this shit while I’m sitting in jail. That’s bogus.” Here, Jayden highlighted how the historically contingent criminalization of marijuana determined his freedom. Jayden’s criminalized marijuana use is particularly poignant in Minnesota, one of the growing number of states to recognize the drug’s medical value through partial legalization. This program, however, is one of the most restrictive and expensive programs in the United States. The program prohibits smokeable flower while requiring patients to use the far more expensive processed oil forms, regulating access to care through legal mechanisms and criminalizing the most affordable forms (Steel, forthcoming). While Jayden was acutely aware of how strong-arm sobriety misrepresented him as a “criminal addict” and put him at risk of revocation, at the time of the interview, he had so far evaded the consequences of violations.

Other participants were not as lucky, describing how these institutionally prescribed perspectives on drug use misrecognized their struggles and perseverance, imposing punishment in lieu of care. Ann, a white fifty-six-year-old woman, described a rocky childhood with an abusive mother. While she had reached stability in early adulthood, Ann began drinking after a bad divorce and breast cancer diagnosis that impacted her ability to work. A particularly bad binge, and subsequent DUI, caused her to lose her apartment and her white-collar job. At the time of the interview, she was sleeping on a friend’s couch and reported difficulty providing herself with food and supporting herself financially. She had gone to the emergency room twice in the past year, both after drinking binges. After one of these binges, a friend she was staying with called the police, and Ann’s probation officer filed a violation. Ann spent nineteen days in jail on that charge ^{Footnote 6} and recalls her disbelief at hearing her probation officer describe her case in court: “When the guy gave me the Rule 25, he said ‘why is she keeping you in here?’ I said, ‘I don’t know, she never talked to me.’ She just showed up at court and said some things that were not true…. She said ‘she can’t keep a job’. And that’s not true; I can’t get a job” (emphasis added).

Ann’s comments pinpoint her probation officer’s misrecognition through strong-arm sobriety. By describing Ann as someone who cannot keep a job, the probation officer painted a picture of a person who is out of control, someone who has been given opportunities but has spoiled her chance at success. Ann wanted to correct this perception in our interview, highlighting how periods of mandated treatment exacerbated her economic deprivation: “When you’ve been through several in-patient treatments, you’re taking us out of the mix, you’re making it harder for us to find a job, you’re making these people homeless because they can’t find a job.” In addition to the impossibility of obtaining a job while in rehab, Ann also faced the temporal and geographic challenges of the random UA system, which tied her to a long bus commute to the downtown testing center. From Ann’s perspective, she had not had the opportunity to spoil her own chances—the conditions of probation had already done so for her.

As Ann’s case demonstrates, services, testing, and revocation were intimately intertwined, constituting a pathway between substance use and punishment that could be hard to escape. Of course, the risks of this relationship were particularly significant for participants who were under intense surveillance, a common practice for those assessed as high “need” or high “risk” through risk-needs assessment tools (Prins and Reich Reference Prins and Reich2021). Randall, a thirty-nine-year-old mixed race Black man, described the scrutiny he was under after a revocation: “I have to watch literally everything I do because they got me under a microscope.” For years, Randall had struggled with serious mental health challenges that he said were exacerbated by a history of misdiagnosis. He described his last five years as a cyclical pattern of mental health crises leading to criminal justice contact, which was then exacerbated by mental health issues and substance use, putting him at risk for deeper system involvement.

The arrest leading to Randall’s current stint on probation followed on the heels of what he described as a misdiagnosis for anxiety and a prescription for antidepressants: “After a week or so of taking those antidepressants and building up [in] my system I called the doctor … and said ‘hey man, I’m agitated, I don’t feel right, something’s wrong.’” Randall reported that his doctor told him to keep taking the medication and that it would be okay. A week later, he was in psychosis and had been jailed. Between 2014 and 2017, Randall struggled with repeat arrests interspersed with jail stays, multiple stints of homelessness, and shelter living. During this period, Randall was evaluated by a state case manager, who declared him disabled and found that he was eligible for a plethora of state services specifically for adults with serious mental illness. This included residence in an assisted living facility and intensive case management.

In some ways, however, this state support operated in tandem with his criminal justice supervision rather than distinct from it. Indeed, it was apparently communication between his case manager and probation officer that led to his eventual revocation. Randall forgot about a meeting with his case manager on a Monday; on Tuesday, his probation officer showed up at his residence and had his place searched. Randall had a small bag of drugs that he said he had intended to sell, and this was discovered in the search. He was put in jail and received an ultimatum: stay incarcerated or attend in-patient drug treatment. He refused treatment for four months but, ultimately, relented and completed a month-long stint in rehab. When the interviewer asked Randall if treatment was helpful, he said: “Not at all, because I don’t have a drug problem. Well, I don’t have that type of drug problem. ‘Cuz I did have a drug problem but it was not doing drugs.”

Randall’s story reflects a pervasive practice of poverty governance through strong-arm sobriety—mandated sobriety and treatment comes to govern a large swath of people as “criminal addicts” in ways that can be arbitrarily connected to addiction. Indeed, ethnographers of state-mandated rehab facilities often find patients with greatly varying relationships to substance use, ranging from people who report severe addictions to people who were caught with drugs but, even by the counselors’ standards, do not really have a “problem” with drugs or alcohol (Gowan and Whetstone Reference Gowan and Whetstone2012; Kaye Reference Kaye2013; Miller Reference Miller2021). In theory, Randall’s eligibility for enhanced social services due to his mental health conditions should have resulted in more attentive and individualized care. In fact, Randall noted that it was his probation officer that first suggested that his diagnosis was incorrect and that he may actually be suffering from bipolar disorder, which resulted in a new diagnosis and better psychiatric medication. But as this attentiveness complemented the imperatives of criminal justice surveillance, it simultaneously empowered the “microscope” that detects even slight missteps. Importantly, it was Randall’s non-substance related needs that opened him up for this push into punitive treatment, as his mental health case managers operated as an extension of his probation officer’s surveillance. Thus, the collective effect of this “caring” surveillance was to shuffle Randall across the punishment-welfare continuum (Brydolf-Horwitz and Beckett Reference Brydolf-Horwitz and Beckett2021).

Like Ann and Randall, most of our participants were well aware that substance use carried potent meanings across different institutional settings; in the context of strong-arm sobriety, all drug use was an indication of a criminal addict subject and punishable through revocation. One participant, Samuel, a Black man in his late fifties, summarized the ways in which his use is perceived differently across institutional settings: “If I wanna have a drink or something it’s like I’m an alcoholic, I’m out of control and all that. And that’s not the case but that’s the way it’s written. Because I caught a relapse, I caught it [laughs] instead of slipping and that’s the way it is.” What might be called a “slip” in a more low-stakes context is understood as a “relapse” for the patient in treatment. And, in a field legally and rationally organized by strong-arm sobriety, a “relapse” quickly becomes a technical violation and potential revocation. By combining the phrase “experiencing a relapse” with “catching a case” to describe how he “caught a relapse,” Samuel conveys the high stakes of coercive care.

One of the interesting things about Samuel’s word choice here is that he was not someone who exclusively resisted strong-arm sobriety’s prescription of his identity. Indeed, Samuel himself expressed ambivalence about what to make of the severity of his drinking and how it intersected with the numerous other challenges in his life, including a serious disability. Yet, rather than see drug use as recreation, self-medication, a sign of a medical disorder, or a symptom of other kinds of precarity, strong-arm sobriety framed all alcohol and drug use as the poor life choices of the criminal addict. This reading of substance use reduced the myriad of personal and structural problems facing our participants into “bad choices” that were punished through coercive intervention. At the deeper carceral end, this punitive intervention resulted in incarceration, with such punishment justified as necessary to corral participants’ substance use and the threat associated with such behavior.