Tough Times and the Ethnography of State Intimacies

Backlit by the flickering nightly display of #NYTough, a beacon projected onto the massive Empire State Government Plaza in Albany, New York, I read these two ethnographic encounters during the COVID-19 lockdown, a surreal experience for a scholar of drug policy, treatment, and science. Meant to showcase New Yorkers’ resilience, the slogan beamed its polysemic “tough love” signal across one of former New York State Governor Nelson Rockefeller’s monumental architectural follies. Far more consequential a folly has been the 1973 Rockefeller Laws, “get tough” drug laws mimicked throughout the United States’ “little Rockefeller laws” (Maggio, 2006). The Rockefeller Laws fueled mass incarceration with lengthy mandatory minimum sentences, and went unreformed until 2009 (Office of the New York State Governor, 2009). These laws provoked a particularly masculinist style of #NYTough law enforcement over more than 40 years’ existence, ensnaring a wide swath of New Yorkers—particularly poor persons of color—within the purview of the criminal justice system (Kohler-Hausman 2010, 2017). Reform set in motion an “evolving process in which a shift from punishment to treatment is occurring alongside a growing demand for treatment providers to meet the requirements of the criminal justice system” (Riggs et al., 2014). While the distinctly nontherapeutic criminalization process—which the Rockefeller Laws exemplify—will remain with the disunited states for a long time to come, experiments in therapeutic jurisprudence have yielded a system of “drug courts,” in which judges may exercise a degree of autonomy in sanctioning, while fostering relationships of emotional dependency with “participants” into whose lives they intrude deeply (Kaye, 2020, p. 66). This essay considers two recent U.S.-based books that reveal the inner workings of drug courts and prison-based treatment programs, situating each within the larger stakes of feminist drug ethnography and historiography. The scope of this review essay widened beyond the contribution each book makes to the ethnographic record to encompass the broader question of how states—those “coldest of all cold monsters” (Nietzsche, 1892/1930, p. 56)—respond to “unloved” subjects who use drugs. My purpose is to