A kinder, gentler drug war? Race, drugs, and punishment in 21st century America

Beckett, Katherine; Brydolf-Horwitz, Marco

doi:10.1177/1462474520925145

Cited by 22 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 44 publications

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“…In contemporary American society, law enforcement institutions maintain far-reaching epistemic authority over the illicit drug market. From organized raids of “Chinese” opium dens in the 1800s to the over-incarceration Black Americans in the “crack epidemic” of the 1980s to today's “kinder, gentler drug war” against a largely white population of people who use drugs, the policing of drug markets in the United States has always been a vehicle through which state powers pursued broader, racialized political agendas (Alexander, 2013; Beckett & Brydolf-Horwitz, 2020; Campbell, 2007). Today, in the thick of political “colorblindness” that obscures the centrality of race in our imaginations of drug use and drug criminalization (Alexander, 2013; Hansen et al, 2020), the enforcement of drug laws also tends to appear stripped of its racialized logics.…”

Section: Collective Seeing From Nowhere and From Everywherementioning

confidence: 99%

Auras of Detection: Power and Knowledge in Drug Prohibition

Carroll

2021

Contemporary Drug Problems

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Drug checking is an evidence-based strategy for overdose prevention that continues to operate (where it operates) in a legal “gray zone” due to the legal classification of some drug checking tools as drug paraphernalia—the purview of law enforcement, not public health. This article takes the emergence of fentanyl in the U.S. drug supply as a starting point for examining two closely related questions about drug checking and drug market expertise. First, how is the epistemic authority of law enforcement over the material realities of the drug market produced? Second, in the context of that authority, what are the socio-political implications of technologically advanced drug checking instruments in the hands of people who use drugs? The expertise that people who use drugs maintain about the nature of illicit drug market and how to navigate the illicit drug supply has long been discounted as untrustworthy, irrational, or otherwise invalid. Yet, increased access to drug checking tools has the potential to afford the knowledge produced by people who use drugs a technological validity it has never before enjoyed. In this article, I engage with theories of knowledge production and ontological standpoint from the field of science, technology, and society studies to examine how law enforcement produces and maintains epistemic authority over the illicit drug market and to explore how drug checking technologies enable new forms of knowledge production. I argue that drug checking be viewed as a form of social resistance against law enforcement’s epistemological authority and as a refuge against the harms produced by drug criminalization.

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Section: Collective Seeing From Nowhere and From Everywherementioning

confidence: 99%

Auras of Detection: Power and Knowledge in Drug Prohibition

Carroll

2021

Contemporary Drug Problems

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“…suffer, but less educated whites were next in line." To the extent that imprisonment, like mortality, reflects broad-based changes in people's life circumstances (Sen 1998;Wilson 1987;Autor, Dorn, and Hanson 2016), trends in imprisonment may track these trends in mortality (Beckett and Brydolf-Horwitz 2020).…”

Section: Racial and Class Inequality In Imprisonmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This makes them a better measure of recent changes in imprisonment than imprisonment rates, which reflect both recent prison admissions and the lagged effect of earlier prison admissions. Although numerous studies, including the annual reports of the Bureau of Justice Statistics, have tracked changes in racial inequality in incarceration in the twenty-first century (Subramanian, Riley, and Mai 2018;Beckett and Brydolf-Horwitz 2020;Sabol, Johnson, and Caccavale 2020), these studies have not conducted parallel analyses of changes in class inequality in prison admissions.…”

Section: The Present Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

Racial and Class Inequality in US Incarceration in the Early Twenty-First Century

Muller¹,

Roehrkasse²

2021

Social Forces

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The relative importance of racial and class inequality in incarceration in the United States has recently become the subject of much debate. In this paper, we seek to give this debate a stronger empirical foundation. First, we update previous research on racial and class inequality in people’s likelihood of being imprisoned. Then, we examine racial and class inequality in people’s risk of having a family member imprisoned or living in a high-imprisonment neighborhood. We find that racial inequality in prison admissions has fallen in the twenty-first century, while class inequality has surged. However, in recent years, Black people with high levels of education and income were more likely than white people with low levels of education and income to experience the imprisonment of a family member or to live in a neighborhood with a high imprisonment rate. These seemingly contradictory conclusions can be reconciled by the fact that enduring structures of racial domination have made class boundaries among Black people more permeable than they are among white people. Imprisonment in the United States is increasingly reserved for the poor. But because Black Americans are disproportionately connected to the poor through their families and neighborhoods, racial inequality exceeds class inequality in people’s indirect experiences with imprisonment.

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Section: Sources Of Biased Criminal Historiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Beckett and Brydolf-Horwitz [57] recently observed a modest decline in drug arrests over the last ten years in the US and the number of drug arrests involving Black people declined 31.3%. Nevertheless, they note that Black people remain "notably over-represented among drug arrestees" [57]. As an aside, they observed that drug arrests of Asian/Pacific Islanders increased 64.4% between 2007 and 2018 and drug arrests involving Native Americans increased 59.5%.…”

Section: Sources Of Biased Criminal Historiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Trouble with Using Risk Assessment Instruments to Quantify the Chance of Future Offending

Goddard

2021

Sustainability

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Risk assessments in carceral settings have proliferated in recent decades and are now prominent in numerous states and regions. A ubiquitous variety is actuarial risk assessment instruments that are used on children and adults to predict their future chance for misconduct (e.g., recidivism) in several vital decision points in carceral processing (e.g., pretrial confinement). These instruments rely on information about past behavior (e.g., criminal history) and an understanding of offending (e.g., antisocial personality) that is thought to be neutral, reliable, and enjoys predictive validity. However, it will be argued that when justice system personnel assess the chance of unwanted behavior in the future, several risk domains are differentially prevalent and more frequently experienced by some groups. Much of this disparity is caused by, or due to, forces external to those being assessed, for instance, inequitable social and economic conditions and inequitable decisions by justice personnel to arrest, charge, or sentence people of color. As such, risk assessment instruments inevitably and disproportionately mark some groups of people as a higher risk to violate rules, conditions, orders, or laws. Consequently, risk assessment instruments systematically disfavor disadvantage, and by inference, favor advantage, leading to the need for a radical shift in the taxonomy of classifying risk for future misconduct.

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A kinder, gentler drug war? Race, drugs, and punishment in 21st century America

Cited by 22 publications

References 44 publications

Auras of Detection: Power and Knowledge in Drug Prohibition

Auras of Detection: Power and Knowledge in Drug Prohibition

Racial and Class Inequality in US Incarceration in the Early Twenty-First Century

The Trouble with Using Risk Assessment Instruments to Quantify the Chance of Future Offending

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