Policing Pain: The Opioid Crisis, Abolition, and a New Ethic of Care [Hardcover]

How the medicalization of addiction during the U.S. opioid crisis has driven mass incarceration and mass policing in rural and deindustrialized communities

The nationwide opioid public health emergency has led many advocates and public officials to call for drug policy reforms that reject traditional law-and-order approaches. InPolicing Pain, Kevin Revier approaches the opioid epidemic from an abolitionist framework that seeks to treat people who use opioids not as so-called criminals, but as people in need of health care. Based on two years of ethnographic research in Upstate New York, a region highly impacted by overdoses, job loss, and deindustrialization, Revier shows that incorporation of treatment within the criminal justice system has ultimately expanded the scope of the drug war, turning individuals into treatable carceral subjects who are both medicalizedandcriminalized.

He argues that the incorporation of medical rhetoric and treatment within the criminal legal system maintains a carceral approach in rural and low-income areas facing high rates of opioid overdose and economic disinvestment, further entrenching the carceral state in the lives of people who use drugs. Ultimately,Policing Painexplores alternative strategies to promote harm reduction from an abolitionist ethic of care that advocates for people who use drugs while seeking to minimize criminal justice involvement in drug-related issues.

Kevin Revieris Assistant Professor in the Sociology/Anthropology Department at SUNY Cortland. Kevin Revier's insightful ethnographic case study combined with an abolitionist epistemology compels us to demand alternatives to incarceration that aren't rooted in treatment modalities that reproduce the logics and practices of punishment and the erasure of structural explanations. He shows in excruciating detail how drug courts and jail treatment programs are part of the problem, not the solution, and lays outl³æ