Trapped: The Limits of Care in California's Mental Health Courts.

Cooper, Jessica

From his patient seat in the courtroom's jury box, Ramon Diaz quietly sighed and rested his cheek on his shackled wrist. At the time, a sunny Friday morning in the winter of 2015, Ramon was an inmate in the Santa Clara County (California) Main Jail. (1) Although he appeared to be content enough in his wait for the judge to call his case, he was agitated by the length of his incarceration. In 2011, the district attorney had charged Ramon with theft, and Ramon had been unable to extricate himself from the criminal justice system since. As punishment, Ramon spent a few months in county jail and then spent a year on probation. Soon after his release, Ramon was reincarcerated for possession of a controlled substance. The same thing happened with the drug case as happened with the theft: Ramon was put in jail for a short period, released on probation, and then, a few months later, was charged with a new crime for which he was taken back into custody. It was the new crime that brought Ramon to court on this particular morning. He had been in custody on the new charge for eight months, waiting for this hearing.

Two factors contributed to Ramon's extended incarceration. First, the drug charge and the most recent charge were not so-called straight charges. Rather, because Ramon was already on probation at the time of their alleged commission, the court treated both charges as new criminal offenses and as probation violations. Being on probation when charged with a new offense tacks on a coefficient to punishment; crimes such as, say, a minor drug possession charge that a judge might otherwise lightly sentence are taken as indicia of a persistent criminogenic attitude. The doubled-down sentencing of these charges makes it all but impossible for individuals to serve their time and be rid of the system. The criminal justice system intensifies its grip as time goes on (Domanick 2005; Lynch 2016; Simon 1993).

Besides the probation complications, all of Ramon's cases were sent to Santa Clara's mental health court, further extending the length of his pre-conviction incarceration. The mental health court is a criminal courtroom that tries to move individuals who have been convicted of crimes and have psychiatric diagnoses out of jail and into community psychiatric programs. To participate, individuals whose cases are sent to the mental health court accept guilty pleas in exchange for access to court-sponsored public health care and social services, like employment assistance and housing. From this point forward, individuals, once known as defendants, are referred to as courtroom clients. The mental health court actively monitors the clients' progress towards mental health, requiring them to return to court regularly to assess whether or not they are abiding by court-developed treatment plans. To these ends, the court employs a team of psychologists who collaborate with the public defender, the district attorney, social workers, and the judge to evaluate clients. Should the court find that a client is deviating from the treatment plan, the court can return them to custody. The chance to avoid imprisonment by way of treatment, in the eyes of the professionals who staff the mental health court, is worth any delay in the courtroom process. Clients are released from jail not on a date determined by their criminal sentences, but rather when a bed is available at one of the residential facilities contracted by the court. Courtroom monitoring ends when the court determines that the clients will take responsibility for maintaining their mental health. Adjudication perdures.

This is the slow context in which Ramon expressed his frustration to the courtroom. When Judge Stephen V. Manley, the judge of the Santa Clara County mental health court, called Ramon's case, Ramon snapped his chin off the palm of his hand and leaned forward in his seat. (2) He was ready--still relaxed but attentive.

Ramon addressed the judge first, clearly and calmly, "Hi, Judge, yeah, look, I've basically been in here for four years. That's four years of my life. I want to just serve my time and be done."

This opening declaration was, in measured speech, a sudden throwdown: a demand to reverse the court's position that the final provision of care is worth the crawling pace at which it is delivered, a demand for finality, a demand for a deadline.

Judge Manley looked down at the file in front of him. "Ramon, the latest charge is a violent felony. You're going to serve two years in state prison [if you refuse to participate in the mental health court]. You can't want that." In his challenge to Judge Manley, in his request to "just serve time," Ramon confounded the ethos of the mental health court in which any alternative form of oversight is preferable to prison.

And so Ramon came back, still calm but similarly baffled by the judge's incomprehension: "Judge, I've been here four years. I can't do programs. They don't work for me. I end up back in jail. I don't want to be here anymore. I just want to serve my time, be done with it, and then I can move back home to Miami."

Ramon's public defender and the judge reacted to this request with equal outrage. The choice for prison was so illegible to the court that the public defender used it as evidence for mental incompetence, requesting that a jailhouse psychiatrist "go and talk to him because he's acting aggressive and he's going to go to prison and he's not in a position to make any choices about what he wants right now."

Ramon slowly turned to his public defender, confused. "No, I'm on my meds. I take them every day. I've seen the psychiatrist. I just want to go to prison."

Judge Manley threw Ramon's manila case file on to his desk in frustration. "Ramon! You don't understand. If you go to prison, you can't just go to Miami. You're going to have to be on parole when you're done. You're going to have to stay in this county."

Ramon shrugged, lackadaisically. "Parole has to be better than probation ..." (3)

Judge Manley scoffed, almost with laughter. "No, no, now you don't know what you're talking about. You have to see your parole agent every week. They follow you; they're looking for any reason to rearrest you."

Ramon shrugged again.

The judge was an older man who spoke with a microphone clipped to his neat tie knot to amplify his voice. His voice rose with such sudden vitriol that the microphone squawked and buzzed. "Ramon! It never ends! You don't understand that. It never ends."

The mechanized ring of the microphone shrilly reverberated around the courtroom, carrying the judge's admonition into the future, beyond his utterance. It never ends.

The court team prevented Ramon from choosing prison for the time being. The public defender asked to continue the case until she received a report from the jail psychiatrist, thereby extending the type of ceaseless adjudication from which Ramon wanted reprieve in the first place. The clerk set the case to return to court in a month. Perhaps that would be enough time for the psychiatrist to visit Ramon in his jail cell. It never ends.

Neoliberalism, Otherwise

It never ends. The interminability of state intervention for those people whom the state has identified as criminals mocks the broader decline of publicly available social and medical services. Mass incarceration is chained to neoliberalism, which operates on logics of efficiency and individual accountability. (4) Efficiency from within, whereby prisons scale up the costs of their operations, rendering their practices all the cheaper the more overcrowded the facility (Aviram 2015; Gottschalk 2015; Simon 2014). Efficiency from without, whereby states find bodies with which to overcrowd their prisons through the incarceration of those who cannot find steady employment (Harcourt 2012; Murakawa 2014, 149-51). (5) These twin efficiencies contribute to the paradoxical practices of American incarceration, establishing carceral institutions as the last bastion of social services in an ever-shrinking economy of public goods. Jail is the place where people who need help but cannot receive it from other institutions go for food, shelter, and health care (see also De Giorgi, this volume; Myers, this volume). It is the only public institution incapable of turning someone away, so long as they commit a serious-enough crime. (6)

In the aftermath of the United States Supreme Court's determination that California's overcrowded prison conditions were unconstitutional and of California's subsequent carceral restructuring, Jonathan Simon (2014, 1) has hailed a new era in which mass incarceration is "finally ebbing." (7) Simon's optimism keys to an understanding of incarceration that is defined by its spatial elements. In both legal argument and academic critique, overcrowding has been the hallmark of mass incarceration. Even the term "mass incarceration" foregrounds spatial scale. However, I suggest that the interminability of adjudicative experience--found in the very programs, like mental health courts, that aim to end mass incarceration by surveilling people in the community--acts as a temporal analog to the spatial concerns invited by hyper-imprisonment. Does it matter that the cell door is unlocked when, under arguably the best circumstances of avoiding prison, it never ends?

Mass incarceration bears awkward witness to an involution of logics of efficiency. At the end of the day, when the state has outsourced all it can in the provision of social services, there remains a population for whom the state must provide: the incarcerated. The more the state declines to participate in economic regulation, the more people are shunted into the sole domain in which the state does provide--hence mass incarceration. Yet, the actual practice of providing social services and medical care out of a public courtroom challenges the limits of neoliberalism. Is this arrangement of care a reversal of the neoliberal aspects of mass incarceration? From a spatial understanding of incarceration, one might suppose so. Loic Wacquant (2009) observes the overlapping population between carceral and welfare functions of the state to suggest that as the welfare arm of the American state retreats, the state's punitive arm extends, rerouting the same individuals once served by welfare institutions into the carceral system. Wacquant sees the welfare and carceral functions of the state as fundamentally different spaces. A shift in location from welfare institution to penal institution engenders a radically different encounter with the state. But what happens when the criminal justice system tries to emulate the welfare system? What happens when the two are not discrete spaces but so converged that the criminal justice system might be a uniquely robust provider of welfare services? In this arrangement, perhaps the spaces of penality and welfare matter less than their times.

Take, for example, Elizabeth Povinelli (2011), who stakes her analysis of neoliberalism, or "late liberalism," in time. In her examination of the "cruddy" survival of Aboriginal communities in Australia, Povinelli (2011, 3,128) reminds us that regimes of power seep into daily life as "a spacing rather than a space." Late liberalism, Povinelli argues, engenders a mode of governance in which state violence operates below the level of an event; the Australian state deprives Aboriginal communities of the resources needed to alleviate poverty and then depicts these communities as responsible for their own suffering. To access modes of life within the spacing of late liberalism and to understand the power relations that motivate and permeate suffering and survival, Povinelli employs an analytic of endurance as a way of being-in-the-world that foregrounds temporality. Povinelli is keenly aware of the suffering endured by her interlocutors in their efforts to refuse endurance's opposite: exhaustion. It is the state, at the helm of late liberalism, that identifies "who will not be able to sustain their perseverance" (ibid., 118). Endurance in this world is adversarial. The Indigenous communities with whom Povinelli works find themselves hardening, calcifying their "ethical substance" in opposition to the state's threats of extinction (ibid., 15-16, 116). Endurance demands an opponent.

Mental health courts are explicitly nonadversarial in their legal structure, rendering opposition theoretically difficult to sustain by design. Defense attorneys work with prosecutors, who work with clinicians, who work with clients, who work with the judge. Prosecution and defense do not oppose one another, in marked contrast to standard American criminal procedure (see Kagan 2001). Such ostensible collaboration does something to the type of endurance that Povinelli describes. The population of courtroom clients in Santa Clara's mental health court struggle to endure. The majority of clients are homeless, all carry psychiatric diagnoses and criminal records, and most lack access to consistent health care or food or shelter or anything else that most of us take for granted in the course of survival. Their ability to endure is always in question. Exhaustion saps their everyday and threatens their existence. But clients, like Ramon, lack an obvious antagonist. The people who trap clients within the criminal justice system are the same people who offer them the chance to receive social services by providing psychiatric consultations and employment opportunities outside of the courtroom. Indeed, my conversations with Judge Manley and other courtroom professionals have shown that court professionals themselves feel as though they need to endure state economic austerity; they too are frustrated with an inadequate system of social services in which the beds needed by their clients are ever elusive. Clients and courtroom professionals perdure together. (8)

The irony, then, of this system in which mental health court clients are perpetually trapped is that it brings people together. Clients are regularly caught in the court's clinical and carceral web for upwards of five years. Ramon is no anomaly And as clients interact with the clinicians and attorneys and judges who work in these courtrooms, professionals and clients come to know and care for one another. This care is not necessarily hopeful or optimistic or joyful; indeed, caring about clients, some of whom clinicians consider to be beyond rehabilitation, frequently manifests as frustration or outright anger. I sketch a broad concept of care, one that is not confined within a single emotional register, but instead describes a mutual interest in one another, a sort of intersubjective stake in another person's well-being. If, as Carol Greenhouse (2009, 8) writes, spaces--or times--that are "markedly social and markedly not individualistic" comprise "the limits of neoliberalism," mental health courts undo neoliberalism as they bring it into being.

Care qua sociality is intimately bound to temporality. Time is needed to watch relationships unfold. Care's very expansiveness, its inflection through multiple emotional registers, is made visible through the vicissitudes of relationships experienced over time. Indeed, it is time that makes care cognizable. (9) But if temporality, as time and its pacing, illuminates moments of care, it is also a technology of punishment over which the state and its subjects fight--think back, here, to Ramon's desperate pleas "to just do time" and Judge Manley's refusal to permit Ramon to spend his time in prison. As the criminal justice system increasingly explores modalities of power other than incarceration, such as mental health courts, the time one spends subjected to state surveillance replaces the spatial confines of the prison as an index of punishment. Time gathers care and punishment together, oftentimes to the point of functional indistinction.

Caught by Care

Judge Manley--the mental health court judge who has spent the past two decades of his career passionately working with both Sacramento and Washington, DC to increase funding and improve the care his courtroom provides while simultaneously fulfilling his daily judicial duties--wishes that he were not in this business. Judge Manley spends long hours on the bench and frequently spends his rare time away from the courtroom educating other judges about mental illness, petitioning for policy changes in the county jails, and advocating for more public funding for the homeless. Although the judge's passion is obvious, his exhaustion is never far from the surface. Most conversations that I have with him occur privately in his chambers, after four or so hours of hearing cases. He usually pecks at a palmful of trail mix, one chocolate chip or cashew at a time, to sustain himself. His clerk reminds him that nuts do not a meal make, only for the judge to mutter that he does not have time to sit still, and then he sighs. He does what he does because he cares.

The question, then, is not the presence or absence of care but what this care achieves. For one, Judge Manley's care refuses bureaucratic indifference, that "rejection of common humanity" that Michael Herzfeld (1992, 1, 17, 67) locates at the heart of Western "symbolism of rational government." For Herzfeld, indifference is a symbolic repertoire that bureaucrats cultivate in order to implement decisions made by the state and to justify personal nonintervention. Akhil Gupta (2012) sees a similar type of indifference at work for Indian state bureaucrats who are charged with implementing state development projects. Gupta catapults indifference from a symbol shared by state and citizen, as Herzfeld (1992, 121-26) sees it, to a technology of structural violence inflicted on citizens by the state. Indifference, for Gupta, insulates bureaucrats from having to reckon with their responsibility for the production of arbitrary outcomes for the poverty-stricken Indians who solicit their assistance.

Gupta is focused on the violence produced by a system in which bureaucrats are indifferent towards those who ask for help; the system takes conceptual precedence over individuals. He puts aside "bureaucratic attitudes" so as to emphasize that indifference is "not a psychological state of government employees but a constitutive modality of the state" (Gupta 2012, 6, 23). Insofar as arbitrary outcomes are produced through the state's attempts to remedy poverty, violence is "enacted at the very scene of care" (ibid., 24). But violence in the course and name of care is hardly surprising (see Feldman & Ticktin 2010; Mulla 2014; Stevenson 2014; Ticktin 2011), nor does it fully capture the labor of producing arbitrary outcomes. After all, if well-meaning state bureaucrats inflict violence at a structural level, both victims of violence and those well-meaning bureaucrats engage with the aftermath of violence. Neither care nor violence actually ends with an arbitrary outcome; an "outcome" is only an arbitrary, temporal stop-point produced by the type of audit culture that Gupta (2012, 251-61) identifies as symptomatic of neoliberal economic policies. Reflection and engagement go on.

Judge Manley's sighs, his silences, his suggestions, his occasional snipes--sitting in his courtroom, watching the man at work, one cannot so easily cast aside those "bureaucratic attitudes" as Gupta (2012, 6) encourages. If there are moments of indifference, which Gupta (ibid.,23) characterizes as moments of "uncare," they are to be found within a larger scene in which representatives of the state are deeply unsettled by the knowledge that they will likely produce arbitrary outcomes, despite all efforts to the contrary. Rather than claim any sort of deep difference between caring and indifferent bureaucrats, I use time as an intervention to shift the analytic frame. Herzfeld (1992, 45) warns against academic attacks on "the system," contending that this type of complaint is "a tactic of social fife, not an analytical strategy" (see also Gupta 2012, 306n42). I suggest that we likewise view the transactional nature of indifference--a solicitation, followed by a cold refusal--as an emic rather than analytic construction .

The perdurance of adjudication in Judge Manley's courtroom unbrackets accounts of state-citizen interactions. Clients make no single request of the court and Judge Manley makes no single request of the clients. Judge Manley's refusal of Ramon's request for release occurred during one moment within five years of encounters between the two men and it did nothing to delimit their relationship; indeed, Judge Manley refused Ramon by setting another date for them to meet. And although Judge Manley was not moved to grant Ramon's request for state prison, he was hardly simply indifferent to Ramon. He was initially befuddled, then patiently explanatory, then frustrated, and finally obstinate in his refusal to authorize Ramon's request. Reducing this affective trajectory to its indifferent end obviates the care in which that particular moment is nested. Judge Manley sees his momentary indifference as infused by his longstanding care for the well-being of his court's clients, such that even his refusal to grant Ramon's request is an act of care: an attempt to keep Ramon out of prison. Of course, it is a different question whether Ramon agrees, or has ever agreed, or will ever agree that Judge Manley cares about his well-being. Time, then, is the hinge on which care swings. On one hand, the duration of mental health court adjudication is symptomatic of neoliberal economic policies that trap indigent individuals in the criminal justice system; on the other, the perdurance of adjudication is what enables caring relationships, crammed full of ambivalence, between clients and staff.

Judge Manley balances the intensity of his desire to help with the normative idea that clients should not have to rely on the criminal justice system for social services. The structure of Judge Manley's laments mirrors his sense of being trapped somehow both within and outside of the state. In daily conversation, he would detail to me the specific hardships that he, alongside his clients, experienced as state money for social services dried up: Santa Clara's Housing Authority was no longer even keeping a waitlist for housing vouchers; the homeless shelters were full; state vouchers for food stamps were harder to attain; the public transit agency was cutting routes; community mental health programs were disappearing. Notably, Judge Manley never described these conditions as "neoliberal," as I do here. He used no single word to tie all of these phenomena together. His disinclination to objectify the economic policies at play, I suggest, is because he is located partly within the system of which he is so critical. Location, here, is a proxy; individuals, regardless of their various subject positions, are perfectly capable of theorizing their own lives (Biehl & Locke, forthcoming; Biehl & McKay 2012). But Judge Manley's self-identified location, as both within and outside of the state, flags dual commitments frequently in tension with one another. To conceptually connect the manifold ways in which the state economizes social services would point to his own participation within such an economy. Still, he believes that he can best help by providing services through the criminal justice system, although he wishes that there were options outside. Mental health court professionals like Judge Manley--the very people spearheading interventions that trap clients in community-based programs contained within the criminal justice system--feel trapped by an anemic system of social services outside of the criminaljustice system.

Trapped, Together

These are obviously different trappings. Being frustrated by the political climate in which one works is hardly the same thing as being routinely incarcerated and indefinitely accountable to the terms and conditions of probation. There are significant material differences between these two positions that cannot be overlooked. And yet the experience of frustration with bureaucracy and with the paucity of services available to clients outside of the carceral sphere that clients and bureaucrats share constructs an affective bridge on which clients and professionals communicate and express care.

Consider the experiences of Kaushik Singh, one Santa Clara client. Kaushik has been homeless for the past 15 years. We met when he knocked on the door to the administrative office next to the courtroom--the office occupied by Abby, a court employee who functions as a de facto social worker. Abby recognized Kaushik and remembered some of the details of his case the moment that he walked into her office. Later, she told me that out of the hundreds of clients with whom she worked, she always remembered Kaushik because he scared her. She could never shake from her head her daydreamed images of the violent crime whose commission Kaushik never denied.

Kaushik had come to ask for help. The problem, he explained, was not his bipolar disorder, but the fact that he could not find employment because of his criminal record. He wanted an expungement. Abby explained to him that the first step was for him to get a copy of his rap sheet from the Department of Justice. Abby backed herself up; there was actually a half-step before that first step. To get his rap sheet, Kaushik needed to be fingerprinted by the Sheriff's Department. Kaushik asked how to be fingerprinted, and Abby gave him directions to the Sheriff's headquarters, along with a form that he would need to fill out prior to his arrival.

Kaushik scanned the paper, looking up suddenly, "It says that I need to bring a S25 check with me. I don't have $25." Abby nodded, expectantly. Most clients who stop at her office are unable to pay the administrative fees associated with bureaucracy. Kaushik focused on the circularity of the problem, exasperated, "See, this is the issue! I need to get the fingerprints to get the rap sheet to get the expungement to get the job to get the $25 I need to pay for the fingerprints."

The office in which Abby works is shared. She has a cubicle of her own, but it is small, and at this moment, it was filled with herself, myself, Kaushik, and the stacks of paperwork that Kaushik had procured from his backpack. As Kaushik described the tangle in which he found himself, she pushed her office chair ever so slightly away from him, only leaning in once he stopped himself from talking.

Her voice grew stern as she inched in. "See, Kaushik, that's not helpful. I'm trying to help you. I understand why you're upset, but let's break this down step by step. Anger isn't helpful here."

"Yes! That's exactly what I want. Give me the blueprint. Break it down for me--A, B, C; 1, 2, 3."

Abby printed out the paperwork that Kaushik could use to petition to the Department of Justice to waive the fingerprint fee. He would need to submit evidence of his lack of funds for the waiver, which he would need before going to the Sheriff's Department. But this was not the end of it. There was no blueprint, nothing so linear as "A, B, C" or "1, 2, 3."

Abby asked Kaushik to step out of the office for a moment. I walked him to the door, pointed to the slatted bench across the hall from the office, and told him that I would be out in just a few minutes to bring him back inside.

He told me that he had left a stack of business cards several inches tall in the office and invited me to review them: "That stack, those cards, those are everyone I know. All of the umbrellas that I fall under. If you need to call my attorneys, they're on top."

When I walked back to the cubicle, Abby's hands were resting, rather than printing documents or looking up information on her computer. She looked settled.

"We have a problem," she said to me, "he's not going to get an expungement. Look up the paperwork for the expungement that he would need to file once he gets his fingerprints."

The office's internet was on the fritz, and I took out my phone to find the documentation online. Immediately, I saw what Abby was referencing. In a small box in the middle of the page, the form said that that California would not even consider expungement applications submitted by individuals who had been convicted under a certain suite of statutes, including Kaushik's violent conviction from the 1990s.

"Ah, I see it. This?" I passed my phone to Abby, who nodded. It was spelled out clearly, not a matter for interpretation. Kaushik's application would not be considered. "Should I go get him so we can explain?"

Abby put out an arm to stop me from getting up. "No, wait, we can't explain anything. It has to do with the law and I can't offer legal advice because I work for the court. We need to find an attorney to explain it to him." She passed me the cards that Kaushik had identified as belonging to his attorneys. "Start by calling them."

No one recalled working with Kaushik. Each one told me that they were too busy to take on "a new client." Abby passed me a few numbers for pro bono legal clinics. The first was not accepting new cases until October. The second, a program that advertised "free legal consultations," charged $41 for an initial interview. The third phone number went to a voicemail that explained that the organization was closed but that it would open from 1 to 3 pm on Wednesdays. The program only helps people in person, the message warned, so individuals interested in its services should be in line outside of the office by 8 am. Abby sat next to me, making calls to a few other organizations. She threw her hands up to her head and ruffled her spiky hair.

"Three of the four phone numbers were disconnected. No luck." She took a deep breath and returned to her computer, trying to find some more contacts with connected lines.

After an hour, long past those few minutes after which I had promised Kaushik that I would come for him, we were able to find a clinical professor at a nearby law school who agreed to talk to Kaushik by phone. Kaushik used Abby's phone to speak with the law professor, who explained that Kaushik was ineligible for expungement and suggested that he apply for a certificate of rehabilitation. Kaushik nodded, but continued to use the two terms, "expungement" and "certificate of rehabilitation," interchangeably on his end of the conversation and then continued to talk to me about his expungement after he got off the phone. I could hear the attorney tell Kaushik that she could send Abby and me the paperwork and instructions for the certificate of rehabilitation later that afternoon. Kaushik thanked her and passed the phone back to me. She told me to be on the lookout for a fax; she would send it before she went to lunch. Kaushik left Abby's office, hopeful. The fax never came.

This tale of circularity, stagnancy, and frustration is Kaushik's, but it is also Abby's and my own. It was shared. Abby and Kaushik had different stakes in the outcome, but care united them in a shared affective reaction to the problems at hand. Abby's advice to Kaushik--"let's break this down step-by-step, anger isn't helpful here"--may well have been advice to herself. Indeed, after Kaushik left, Abby turned to me, eyes wide: "I could just scream." She had muffled her own anger in order to try to help calm Kaushik: an act of care, of gearing oneself towards the perceived needs of another. Just as Abby instructs clients to stifle emotional reactions in order to present themselves as agreeable to the people from whom they request help, so too does Abby mute her own reactions. Whether such emotional compartmentalization actually achieves a desired outcome is never certain.

Imagining an End

Ethnographic attention to everyday life in states that endorse neoliberal economic policies highlights the frequently brutal realities that challenge people who do not or cannot comport to market values (Bourgois & Schonberg 2009; Han 2012; Nouvet 2014). In each instance, economic policy acquires a moral valence, as those who do not or cannot economically thrive are seen as morally undeserving of public assistance. People are abandoned, left to fend for themselves under conditions that they frequently find unfair or unethical. Against this dire backdrop of abandonment, anthropologists such as Anne Allison (2013) and Joao Biehl (2005) present care as a mechanism that can invite the abandoned subject back into the fold of social life. Care is figured as hope, a chance to redeem the discarded member of society through sociality. Allison (2013, 179) anticipates that "the humanness of a shared precariousness and shared efforts to do something about it" will "lead to a new 'we,' a radical reconfiguring of the home, a rekindling of hope, and a deterritorialization of the social." These accounts suggest that care can resist the indifference and abandonment that together comprise one specific form of neoliberal violence by bringing people together. Or, to put it differently, care is portrayed as a particularly intimate type of the sociality that might delimit neoliberalism; care, the argument goes, is the up-close-and-personal view of neoliberalism's edge.

But care offered Kaushik no salvation. Abby did care about him. She talked about the case for weeks after he first appeared at the office door, even texting me about the case from her own home when she had to take another medical leave of absence. No amount of care could guarantee Kaushik an expungement or a place to sleep for the night. After Kaushik spoke to the clinical law professor, Abby stayed at the office two hours late to brainstorm solutions. I went home to dinner and to type fieldnotes. Kaushik divided his night between sleeping in a park a few miles away from the courthouse and taking notes on a legal pad to plan for his expungement under the neon lights of a 24-hour parking garage. No one came up with any answers.

Kaushik's perpetual homelessness in the face of care does not speak to care's pointlessness but rather to its limits: Assuming that care's inability to achieve certain ends renders it meaningless would mean subsuming care within a neoliberal logic of efficiency. Foucault (2004/2008, 240, 243) attributes the rapid ascent of neoliberalism in the United States to the adoption of the market as the "principle of intelligibility" used "to decipher non-market relationships and phenomena" like "social phenomena." To distill Kaushik's and Abby's relationship to Abby's inability to meet Kaushik's material needs would be an example of the "absolute" and "unlimited generalization" of a market rationality to all social phenomena that Foucault (ibid., 243) identifies as characteristic of neoliberalism. And yet, the facts that Kaushik spent his night outside, that I had a full meal, and that Abby took medical leave bear on the relationship inaugurated that day in Abby's office. Expectations of what care can achieve come to matter in relationships that unfold over many years, tracking the material possibilities and impossibilities offered by neoliberal policies back into a relationship, even as that relationship is not subordinate to economics. Care and neoliberalism each have limits, contours that are not reducible to one another, that are not etched solely in opposition to one another but that nevertheless intersect.

The "unpredictable social" contains the possibility for relationships to avert the demands of efficiency but in no way guarantees an alternative (Biehl & Petryna 2013, 18). It is this very indeterminacy of the social that offers a life beyond neoliberal logics to court-based relationships while also threatening their survival. Neoliberal austerity brings people together in mental health courts, but then it forecloses the possibility of fulfilling the material needs that brought them together in the first place. Relationships formed in mental health courts, then, for all of the care that they express, are nevertheless founded on something of a false promise.

In tracing the promises made between a mother and daughter throughout the trajectory of addiction, Angela Garcia (2014, 52) describes a promise as "a particular figure and expression of moral experience." The promise functions pragmatically to bind people together, which Garcia (ibid., 54) takes as a moral good. In tandem with the sociality packed into a promise, the promise expresses a "temporal and ontological indeterminacy" that "makes several competing narratives possible" (ibid., 61). But competition among multiple realities is not an evenhanded game, and some narratives are more possible than others. Knowledge of this disparity unsettles relationships between court professionals and clients. As she promised to provide care, Abby knew that she would be unlikely to provide the material goods requested by Kaushik, even while she tried her best to fulfill her promise. The disparity between Abby's and Kaushik's interpretations of care, amplified by the material absence of social services, crystallized as an element of their relationship.

Crystallized and then disintegrated, as time frayed their relationship under the weight of polyvalent promises. Kaushik has not spoken to Abby since her failed attempt to assist with his expungement. As he described the state of their relationship to me when we met outside of the court, his silence derived not from spite, but from pity. He knew that there was nothing that Abby could do to help him. Why make her try? Letting their relationship exhaust itself was Kaushik's own gesture of care towards Abby, a refusal to subject her to a caregiving position tormented by futility. (10)

In his own words, Kaushik has "given up." In the 18 months since we first met, Kaushik's tower of business cards from social service and legal professionals has dwindled to a measly few. Some were lost when his wallet was stolen from the patch of dirt where he usually sleeps. Some were caught in an unexpected rainstorm, stripping the cards bare as their ink dripped away. Some he threw out. The last time that I saw Kaushik, he extracted the last three cards he had from his now-empty backpack and passed them to me. One was my card, which he took back. The two others were from case managers who had tried to help him find housing. I tried to return these two, but he pushed them into my hand. "Take them. They're these rich, White, young ladies who say they want to help, but you know they don't really want to be near me. I don't think they can help me. But maybe they can help you, you know, with your research." I folded the cards into the back of my notebook, wondering when my card might be likewise discarded, when Kaushik might finally recognize me to be just another one of these young White women who are ambivalent about his presence and incapable of ameliorating his material circumstances, when our own relationship will fade away.

If relationships in mental health courts include an acknowledged false promise at their inception, they also offer false hope for the future. Perhaps an unfettered belief in care's ability to push back against neoliberalism is itself a product of the "cruel optimism," to use Lauren Berlant's (2011) phrase, that neoliberalism inspires. The false hope generated by mental health courts does not adhere to clients, who come to learn that material services through the courtroom are unlikely, even as they wait. Nor does it adhere to court professionals, who are so keenly aware of the improbability of being able to meet their clients' needs despite their best efforts. Rather, false hope tucks itself back into the prolonged temporality of adjudication: into the next month that Ramon spends waiting for his new court date, hoping that Judge Manley will come to understand his desire to opt for prison; into the next afternoon that Judge Manley sits on his bench, hoping that the legislature might increase funding for social services; into the next night that Kaushik spends editing his appeal for legal assistance, hoping that finding the right wording will get him his expungement; into the next half-year that Abby spends on leave, hoping that she will be better able to weather the hopelessness upon her return. No one invests these imagined futures with any certain faith, but mental health court adjudication turns on these hollowed-out hopes nonetheless.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author would like to thank her interlocutors in the Santa Clara County Mental Health Court. This research was made possible with the financial support of the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the SPA/Lemelson Foundation, the Center for Health and Wellbeing at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, the Program in American Studies at Princeton University, the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University, and the Department of Anthropology at Princeton University.

NOTES

(1.) Although I have chosen to identify Santa Clara as the county in which these events unfold, all names are pseudonyms to protect my informants' identities, except where noted.

(2.) As he is a public official, I have used Judge Manley's true name with his permission.

(3.) Parole and probation are two different modes of supervision for people who have been convicted of crimes but are presently out of custody. Individuals who are released from state prison earlier than the term of their sentences are placed on parole, which entails state supervision of former inmates while they are out of custody. Probation entails county supervision of individuals who have been convicted of crimes and who may or may not have served jail time.

(4.) Despite a bevy of interest (Brown 2015; Greenhouse 2009; Harvey 2007; Muehlebach 2012; Richland 2009), neoliberalism has become a concept of debatable utility for anthropological scholarship (Venkatesan et al. 2015). Or, as Julia Elyachar (2012, 76) puts it, although "anthropologists have good reason to hate neoliberalism," they have, in the course of their hatred, "risked turning neoliberalism from concept into epithet." I use the term to refer to state-crafted economic policies and a political culture that vaunts efficiency and individual accountability as ultimate moral goods. I heed Michel Foucault's warning that not even the public sector is immune from ncoliberalism's rationality. Neoliberalism need not privatize. For Foucault (2004/2008, 246), a neoliberal epistemology creeps from a grid of decipherment into an ethical regime, such that even the state can operate "in terms of the game of supply and demand, in terms of efficiency." The task, then, becomes one of specificity, as Stephen Collier (2012) and Elizabeth Davis (2013, 18) suggest, one of locating which systems within the state are themselves subject to neoliberal ethics. In this case, the criminal justice system is a particular type of public sector that more stubbornly adheres to neoliberal logics than other types of public institutions (Harcourt 2012). I attend to neoliberalism as a set of priorities that permeates and is promoted by public institutions.

(5.) In response to the call for specificity in regard to identifying neoliberal practices, I note that the functionalist argument of prisons acting to sop up surplus labor is not unique to neoliberal economics regimes. Writing in the first half of the twentieth century, Georg Rusche and Otto Kirchheimer (1939/2003) make an historical Marxist argument to these ends in their classic volume, Punishment and Social Structure. However, the high rates of unemployment under neoliberal economic schemes, in which the state provides only the most minimal social and material resources to those without steady employment, exacerbate the longstanding relationship between unemployment and imprisonment (Wacquant 2009).

(6.) The claim that jails are the only institutions unconditionally available to individuals in need of public assistance might seem overblown. After all, we do have other social services available in the United States. For example, the County of Santa Clara has publicly funded emergency rooms, including Emergency Psychiatric Services (EPS), which encounter many of the same people as the county's mental health court. However, courtroom clinicians complain that EPS regularly streets individuals who arrive seeking care. Streeting refers to the practice by which EPS denies care to these frequently homeless individuals and does not provide referrals to other institutions, instead physically returning them to street corners. I have heard more than one account of EPS refusing to treat people who arrive at its door after having attempted suicide by overdosing on drugs. I was told that EPS designates the use of narcotics to be a police problem rather than a psychiatric problem even when narcotics are used in the service of suicide, deploying these convenient jurisdictional lines to punt the duty of care from the hospital to the police department. For more on American psychiatry's difficulties in providing adequate care in public contexts, see Luhrmann (2010a,b) and Rhodes (1995).

(7.) See Brown n. Plata (2011).

(8.) I develop perdurance in slight distinction to Povinelli's "endurance." Povinelli (2011, 53-60) valorizes survival, such that enduring carries moral weight; she frequently expresses admiration for her Aboriginal interlocutors' abilities to survive frightful conditions of poverty and disease exacerbated by racist Australian policies. To illustrate exhaustion, the "social antonym" of endurance, Povinelli (ibid., 32, 154-55) describes a young man who continues to drink alcohol despite serious health problems, who no longer attempts to endure. Povinelli situates the young man in relation to his aunt, who pleads with her nephew to stop drinking and grieves over his inevitable loss (ibid., 155). Povinelli theorizes from the perspective of the aunt; she laments the young man's acceptance of succumbing to exhaustion. Accordingly, Povinelli gestures to the moral good of endurance as a display of oftentimes incomprehensible strength contra the structural (and state-led) drives toward exhaustion. In contrast, my use of the term perdurance is ambivalent as to the value of survival and leaves open the legitimacy of those who perdure instead wishing for death.

(9.) And yet, a sustained consideration of temporality is absent from the extant sociolegal literature on mental health courts and other nonadversarial, problem-solving courts with whom mental health courts share company, such as drug courts or veterans' courts. Even qualitative sociolegal research on these institutions isolates encounters between courtroom clients and professionals (e.g., Castellano 2011; McNiel & Binder 2010; Mirchandani 2008; Paik 2011; Talesh 2007; Tiger 2012). This body of research presents moments of interaction between professionals and clients to typify the kinds of encounters that one finds in problem-solving courts. However, although these scholars identify the fact that clients regularly return to court where they interact with professionals for years on end, no existing research tracks the waxing and waning of these relationships over the longue duree, as I begin to do here.

(10.) Also in the context of American community psychiatry, Paul Brodwin (2011, 189, 193) advocates for anthropological attention to the "ethnography of futility." Brodwin (ibid., 205) analyzes the ways in which case managers engage with the "temporal structures" of their clinical "everyday routines" to hold the creeping sense of futility in their interactions with psychiatric clients at bay (see also Brodwin 2013, 67-72; cf. Carr 2015). In contrast to Brodwin, who locates futility within the individual subject, I treat futility not as an existential condition that might require management by an individual but as a form of relation. Futility is brokered by people, like Abby and Kaushik, brought into being throughout the course of their relationship, rather than emanating from a single person alone.

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Case Cited

Brown v. Plata, 131 U.S. Sup.Ct. 1910, 1923 (2011).

Jessica Cooper *

* Jessica Cooper (email: jmc6@prineeton.edu) is completing her PhD in Anthropology at Princeton University. Her doctoral research examines the systems of evidence and ethics practiced in two Californian mental health courts.