Policing Pain - (Alternative Criminology) by Kevin Revier (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

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. In Policing Pain, Kevin Revier approaches the opioid epidemic from an abolitionist framework that seeks to treat people who use opioids not as potential 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 medicalized and criminalized.

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 Pain explores 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.

Review Quotes

"Policing Pain exposes how policing, courts, and jails have absorbed the language of care while upholding racialized control and punishment. Through abolitionist analysis and rich ethnography, Revier reveals how carceral power has adapted, medicalized, and deepened its reach. This is a vital book for anyone seeking to understand the entwined histories of racial capitalism, drug prohibition, and the urgent need for abolitionist care."-- "Kerwin Kaye, author of Enforcing Freedom: Drug Courts, Therapeutic Communities, and the Intimacies of the State"

"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 out a vision for a more just path forward."-- "Alex Vitale, author of The End of Policing"

About the Author

Kevin Revier is Assistant Professor in the Sociology/Anthropology Department at SUNY Cortland.