Against the background of teeming state violence, disavowals of the rule of law, and the rise of a post-truth, populist right, and against the foreground of relentless rises in the cost of living, the persistent blossoming of encampments of unhoused people, and a twinned anxiety about both racist overpolicing and public safety: many people in the San Francisco Bay Area understand politics to be at a breaking point. As Joan Didion once wrote of the Haight-Ashbury, now over a half century ago, the sense remains that the center cannot hold. With municipal and state governments less responsive than desired to public calls for improved social services, courtrooms in the Bay Area have taken the mandate to create conditions more conducive for social justice into their own hands. Judges, prosecutors, public defenders, and jailhouse psychologists are collaborating under the rubric of a novel juridical structure – mental health courts – to attempt to provide mental health care and social services to the Bay Area’s underclass, or to people who are homeless, mentally ill, Black and brown, incarcerated, with that last status of captivity attaching to the others via a predictable path of state violence. Unaccountable: Lapses of Liberalism in California’s Mental Health Courts explores the social and ethical relations between court staff and those clients whom staff attempt to support in the context of courts wracked by the dual imperative to care and control. In contrast to an approach that emphasizes the subjectivizing work of courtroom programs, I theorize the affective entanglements of court staff and clients as lapses, or moments when the discursive project of the liberal state exhausts itself, when the ethical and political valences of social relations exceed the liberal terms in which they were inaugurated. In so doing, Unaccountable offers an ethnographic vantage onto the limits of liberalism and encourages readers to grapple with ethics and politics beyond a liberal vice.

Unaccountable is based on close to a decade of research in and around two mental health courts in San Francisco and San Jose, with a period of intensive fieldwork undertaken from 2014-2016. There, criminal courts attempted to do justice differently by providing social and psychiatric care to people whom court staff believed would be better supported by services than by incarceration; the intent was to retool liberal juridical and penal technologies to serve more progressive ends. I document relationships between court staff and clients from within the shared yet fractious space of struggle to achieve a more just world. The text follows court clients, judges, attorneys, clinicians, social workers, probation officers, parole agents, and their families across and through the spaces designed for the dual provision of care and punishment: outpatient mental health clinics, courtrooms, jail, in-patient crisis centres, halfway houses, and the encampments where court clients, the vast majority of whom are homeless, dwell. Across material inequities, court staff members’ and clients’ frustrations and fears are simultaneously affective and ethical. How do people across unequal social positions relate to one another under in circumstances that they understand to be untenable, and what ethics do these relations entail? And, in the case where these relations emerge between people, some of whom are tasked with both providing socio-psychiatric support and incarcerating others and others who both depend upon and are often disappointed by the support provided, as was the case in my field research, what meaning does “justice” take?