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The article discusses carceral punishment, the limits placed on freedom of association and the interaction among prisoners, and the porosity of epistemological penal borders. Topics include research on policing of carceral boundaries in a Canadian context, issues on transparency and human rights abuses, and the crisis of accountability in the penal system. Other topics include the consequences of a closed border mentality, and its impact on qualitative research on governance.

We draw on a field study of three drug treatment courts to show that responsibilization strategies create a paradox of bulimic exclusion and empowerment for individual subjects. By theorizing three different subjectivities emerging from our research sites (outcasts, performers and true believers), we show how subjects of intervention actively work to negotiate their own experiences of responsibilization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the torrent of the punitive state, people in conflict with the law are made up as 'clients' of criminal justice. This article looks curiously upon the figure of the client, positioning her as a translation of the offender who flags particular relationships of justice. While the client is nowhere to be found on the public face of punishment, she emerges in the most unlikely of places (prisons, courts) when looking at punishment's inner workings. The client, we argue, is born of the elision of managerial and consumerist discourses in order to recruit people in conflict with the law and justice workers into contemporary penal project. The subject positions of criminal justice actors (offenders and workers) are reframed such that they are all active agents in the practice of social service delivery. These translations reveal the fluidity of identities and relationships within the criminal justice system and teach us about the political strategies underlying differing argots of punishment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the structure and achievements of Drug Treatment Courts in North America. The first recognized Drug Court was introduced in Florida in 1980s. Since then, the therapeutic court model in judicial system spread across the globe. According to the author, Canadians are partial to the frontier justice mentality of their fellow Americans. However, he notes that Canada favors rehabilitative ethics more than U.S. does. Treatment courts deliver social services to drug addicts, including housing and health care. The effectiveness of therapeutic court model in reducing recidivism and drug use rates is questioned.