The San Diego Family Justice Center (FJC) model seeks to lessen the burden on domestic violence victims by co-locating social service agencies, law enforcement, and prosecution at one site. Shortly following the inception of the model in 2002, it gained widespread acclaim (and federal funding), spreading the model across the country. Using visual and textual discourse analysis, this paper examines the promotional and procedural material produced by proponents of the San Diego FJC model. FJC materials construct victimhood using discourses of crime control and therapeutic intervention. The resulting discursive formation is that of the passive, dependent battered woman, curable only through robustly punitive state intervention. In this way, FJC materials not only advance a distinct construction of victimhood but also a particular agenda for punishment policy. Extending Jonathan Simon’s contentions regarding the resonance of victim discourse within American society, I argue that therapeutic discourse can bolster the effectiveness of punitive campaigns.
Over the past half-century, the US welfare and penal systems have become increasingly fused modes of poverty governance. At the center of the welfare-penal continuum sits probation, a form of community supervision that operates as a central hub, directing people to both services and incarceration. Drawing on interviews with 166 adults on probation in Hennepin County, Minnesota, in 2019, we argue that the coercive care of probation is structured by the broader project of controlling alcohol and drug use among the poor. Developing the concept of strong-arm sobriety, we show how the “criminal addict” trope undergirds the central processes of probation: treatment, testing, and revocation. We argue that strong-arm sobriety misreads structural precarity as the result, rather than the cause, of individuals’ choices. In doing so, strong-arm sobriety fails to address the circumstances that engender substance use and produces future subjects for coercive care.
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