Pushing Back the Walls: The Politics of Maneuver in Women’s Drug Rehabilitation

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article uses participant-observation research from the women’s floor of a residential drug-treatment program in Queens, New York City, to explore how rehabilitative institutions instantiate and extend carceral geographies, practices, and design, despite their asserted “alternative to incarceration” status. Focusing on two aspects of rehabilitation architecture – routinization/orderliness and therapeutic quarantine/containment – I show how the spatial politics of rehabilitation enforce drug use as a pathological, criminological problem of racialized–gendered deviance that must be corrected through isolation, “habilitation,” and punitive discipline. Against these violent constructions, criminalized women who use drugs experimented with ways of being for themselves and each other that moved against how the rehab attempted to contain, sever, and reorient their desires. Using the examples of sleep, bodily adornment, and bedroom decor, I argue that criminalized women intervened in, commented on, and sometimes resisted carceral spatial practices of rehabilitation.