Judging Addicts: Drug Courts and Coercion in the Justice System. By Rebecca Tiger. New York & London: New York Univ. Press, 2013. 208 pp. $23.00 paper.

Judging Addicts: Drug Courts and Coercion in the Justice System. By Rebecca Tiger. New York & London: New York Univ. Press, 2013. 208 pp. $23.00 paper.Drug courts began to proliferate in the mid-1990s, following the War on Drugs, at a time when the prison boom was at its peak. The ailing criminal justice system, faced with a mass of drug-related offenders, high recidivism rates, and a general feeling that "nothing works," needed a cure. Drug courts were established as a potential remedy. By now, celebrating their 25th anniversary, there is a rare consensus on the success of drug courts within a criminal justice system often criticized for being either "soft on crime" or overly punitive. In Judging Addicts, Rebecca Tiger, a professor of sociology at Middlebury College, traces the roots of this consensus. Grounded in a sociology of knowledge perspective, the book delineates the success of drug courts by focusing on the development of our ideas about addiction. Drug courts, claims Tiger, are a manifestation of the "historical triumph" of the disease model of addiction. Moreover, it is a triumph that certifies the formal integration of the medical model into the heart of the state's judicial procedure-profoundly altering the character of "judgment."From a philosophy of punishment perspective, the rise of drug courts in particular, and problem-solving courts in general, is somewhat perplexing, given the collapse of the rehabilitative ideal in the 1970s and the proliferation of extremely punitive forms of punishment ever since. In what is her most original contribution to the limited (yet growing) critical literature on drug courts, Tiger addresses that conundrum by shifting our focus from developments within the criminal justice system to trends and forces outside the system, without which the success of drug courts would have been "unthinkable" (p. 112). In very clear and accessible language, Tiger presents a compelling investigation of how we got to "this place where people see coerced drug treatment with the threat of incarceration as an enlightened and humane approach to drug use" (p. 26). The medicalization of addiction, she argues, in part the result of controversial discoveries about the neurological origins of addiction, has managed to transform the idea of addiction into a disease, whose origins are in the brain and requires cure. The role of medicine, however, is limited; it provides the diagnosis but is not (yet?) able to provide the cure, which is left for the criminal justice system to deal with. Only within this "gray area"-in the gap between the diagnosis and the treatment-could a hybrid such as drug courts have emerged, a crossbreed that mixes therapeutic and punitive approaches in treating its subjects as both "sick" and "bad."Tiger's overarching project is to question two of the central dogmas underlying the success of drug courts. First among these is the common perception of drug courts, in the eyes of its proponents and in the media, as enlightened and innovative. Relying on the work of historian Michael Willrich (2003), Tiger shows how the supposedly revolutionary combination of newly discovered scientific knowledge, together with a legal system eager to take an active social role in the transformation of people's lives, dates back to the Progressive Era. …