Subject to Change: Identity, Culture and Change in the Alcohol and Other Drugs Sector in Tasmania

Abstract

First paragraph: Contemporary rehabilitation industries are increasingly being scrutinised by those in radical and critical scholarship, amid calls for more incisive critiques of the status quo and more emancipatory research agendas to address mounting inequalities (McLaughlin, 2011). Institutions and workforces involved in the rehabilitation of citizens deemed in need of reform are of interest to critical scholars because they form the coalface at which to observe the anticipated and unintended consequences of policies, discourses and practices of social control. Challenging official and mainstream assumptions about these institutions and systems often gives rise to vital opportunities for what Scraton (2002, aptl alls speakig tuth to poe. Thee is a pessig eed fo frank and fearless truth-telling, especially in areas where nearly everything is government run or reliant on government funding, for example, the alcohol and other drugs sector and offender management sector in Australia and elsewhere. The former sector remains closely related to the work of the latter, given the history of Western drug policy (i.e. criminalisation), the advent of therapeutic jurisprudence and drug courts, and the ugeoig ues that ake up the shaed liet goup efletig the ople ut well documented links between drugs and crime (see Seddon, 2006; Hammersley, 2008). Extensive research by the Australian Institute of Criminology demonstrates that, for police detainees and for incarcerated offenders, substance use or misuse is implicated in approximately two thirds (66%) of all criminal offences (Payne & Gaffney, 2012). Empirical findings and large scale data about the drugs-crime nexus need to be situated and analysed in their social, political, legal, economic and cultural context. Valuable insights have been gained, for example, from critical perspectives on the policy agendas, structural implications and real world failings of the War on Drugs and punitive responses to people who use illicit drugs, including appraisal of the human and economic costs and benefits of years of prohibitionist populism (see Welch, 1997; Jiggens, 2005; Douglas & McDonald, 2012).