Policing Pain: The Opioid Crisis, Abolition, and a New Ethic of Care (Alternative Criminology)

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