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Abstract: 

The American drug court is a social movement that can be made sense of according to Erving Goffman’s dramaturgical model. The life-as-theater metaphor is applicable to the drug courts on at least two levels. First, it provides a very useful heuristic for interpreting drug courts as a national (and more recently, international) movement. Leaders strategize in backstage contexts on how best to present the most favorable information about drug courts on the frontstage, i.e., to the media and the general public. Defined scripts and staged performances are used to communicate a particular image of the program in order to garner public support and encourage others to join the movement. Second the local drug court itself can be understood as theater—a metaphor advocates themselves use to describe the program. In this article, Nolan elaborates on this description of drug court through the lens of Goffman’s dramaturgical model.

Keywords: drug court

Affiliations:  1: Williams College.