Damaged and Deserving: On Care in a Veteran Treatment Court |
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Authors: | Ken MacLeish |
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Affiliation: | 1. Center for Medicine, Health &2. Society, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, USAk.macleish@vanderbilt.eduhttps://orcid.org/0000-0003-4815-9291 |
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Abstract: | ABSTRACTIn this article, I describe the life-sustaining but inherently coercive labor of care in a veteran treatment court (VTC), a “helping court” in which veterans charged with less-severe offenses can avoid jail by completing a 12- to 18-month therapeutic and rehabilitative program. This privileged medico-legal status is intertwined with the moral economy of military service in the contemporary US and resonates with the politics of American war-making. I argue that the caring work of the court helps produce the subject of veteran disorder, simultaneously enabling life-sustaining practices and constraining the forms of life that veteran offenders can inhabit. |
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Keywords: | Biopolitics care disability mental illness treatment courts US military veterans |
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