Merging Criminal Justice and Social Welfare in Mental Health Court: The Disparate Impacts and Outcomes of Coercive Aid in the Era of Mass Incarceration

Abstract

This dissertation is motivated by the expansion of the criminal justice system into the domain of social welfare as policymakers and practitioners increasingly look for innovative ways to mitigate the social and economic costs of mass incarceration. Specifically, it focuses on a burgeoning intervention that exemplifies this trend: mental health courts. Mental health courts are designed to solve problems associated with mental illness that result in criminal offending. They connect offenders with mental illness to court-monitored health and social services such as treatment rather than simply punishing them. In the process, they ideally offer a pipeline out of the criminal justice system and stop the so-called “revolving door,” improving outcomes for institutions, communities, and the participants themselves. Yet, while some are optimistic about what these courts can achieve, critics are wary of their potential net-widening effects.

In this dissertation, I build on these two viewpoints by more closely examining when and how these interventions are delivering on the promise of aid versus widening the net of social control. To do so, I introduce a fundamental condition that shapes court operations: social service engagement is coerced, but supervision is partial. Participants spend significant amounts of time outside of the direct supervision of staff and staff do not have access to the innerworkings of participants’ minds. As a result, I argue that mental health courts in practice are in part producing and intervening upon performance – how participants do or do not perform the type of engagement the court aims to coerce. By performance, I move away from working to identify who participants “really are” to instead examining how participants are pressured to present themselves and their problems in this context. My overarching argument is that participants are differently equipped to carry out and benefit from this performative work.

I make this argument by analyzing different dynamics of this performance across four empirical chapters. In my first empirical chapter – chapter 3 – I establish how staff come to value certain ways of being among participants that shape how they allot resources and sanctions. In my fourth chapter, I examine these ways of being as types of performance that participants are differently equipped to carry out. In my fifth chapter, I build on the previous chapter by examining how participants are differently equipped to carry out their performances across time – a particularly important dimension to study given the lengthy duration of these court programs. In my final empirical chapter, I move beyond examining how participants are performing, to examining how they are grappling with the outcomes this performance is supposed to produce – outcomes unevenly achieved among the participant population.

Ultimately, this research joins a body of scholarship focused on the institutional reproduction of inequality to question how our institutions are working and who they are working for, specifically in the criminal justice context in the era of mass incarceration. My contribution is to draw greater attention to the tensions generated by merging social welfare and criminal justice institutional forms and to show the disparate effects of these tensions on the individuals caught up in these institutional contexts today. In the process, I more critically examine the mechanisms shaping participant outcomes in such contexts, particularly by focusing on the dynamics of performance.