Sociology/Anthropology

Methamphetamine (“meth”) has received a massive amount of media attention in the United States over the last decade. In reporting, journalists, politicians, and police commonly link meth to widespread risk, violence, criminality, and rural decay. Although the rise in meth use, addiction, and crime has been largely overstated, such imagery legitimizes an expansion of surveillance and policing to rural landscapes. In this research, I examine the way meth and meth makers are represented in case coverage of a meth lab fire sited in upstate New York. I find that reporters narrate a more general meth lab “social problem formula story” with caricature villains (meth makers), victims (community members), and heroes (law enforcement and legislators). Significantly, this model of storytelling conveys a distorted and exaggerated understanding of meth as a social problem, turning the atypical meth lab case into the “typical,” while legitimizing law and order solutions. In contributing to the contemporary “methamphetamine imaginary,” this formula story forgoes a structural analysis that considers the prevailing global drug war, rural poverty, or broader capital inequality.

Recently released HBO documentary Meth Storm, directed by co-filmmakers and brothers Craig and Brent Renaud, opens with a high speed chase along a stretch of rural Arkansas road. The chase is headed by state troopers and DEA agents in pursuit of José, a suspected member of a drug dealing Mexican cartel. After some struggle, his red Toyota runs into a ditch, causing the car to flip over. "Get on the ground!" troopers yell before they apprehend the shaken man. A text card reads, "Over the last decade law enforcement has virtually shut down American Meth production … Into the void have rushed Mexican Cartels Flooding the US with a cheaper more pure Super Meth called 'ICE'." The documentary is set in Van Buren County, Arkansas, and José's arrest is part of DEA Operation ICE Storm, executed in 2014 and headed by soft-spoken, yet determined DEA agent Johnny Sowell.

Police increasingly rely on new media software for public communication and policing operations. One such software is MobilePatrol: Public Safety App, a free to use mobile phone application marketed by data and analytics company Appriss Safety. It compiles information including mug shot photos, sex offender lists, and most wanted profiles for public access. To capture carceral visuality on the application, I conduct an ethnographic content analysis of police use in upstate New York. I penned a daily user log, took in-app “screenshots”, and analyzed user product reviews. I find that MobilePatrol reinforces an emerging new carceral visibility where an assemblage of police records are rapidly disseminated for widespread consumption, further driving data-led state entrenchment into the public sphere.

With a rise in overdose deaths in the United States, opioid awareness has come in a variety of ways. One of these, as reporters suggest, is obituary writing. Obituaries are considered in news media as offering “brutally frank” depictions of addiction that “chronicle the toll of heroin.” Moreover, obituary sharing by parents and loved ones has increasingly taken place on digital platforms, memorial websites expanding the visibility of overdose death while facilitating the building of virtual grief communities. Not solely commemorating individual loss, obituaries thus contain symbolic power—they reflect dominant social values and shape collective memory. As such, overdose obituaries inform how opioid crisis is framed, represented, and addressed. From a qualitative content analysis of 533 opioid-related U.S. obituaries published on Legacy.com and ObitTree.com, I find that while obituaries reduce stigma associated with drug use, addiction, and overdose, they primarily tell white tales of addiction. In affording a white racial framing of drug addiction, obituary writing corresponds with a larger whitewashing of the opioid crisis while implicitly constructing symbolic boundaries between those memorialized, who are predominantly white and middle-class, and those who are deemed as raced and classed Others. Such storytelling, particularly when popularized in news media and made visible on digital platforms, contributes to ongoing systemic inequality in the prevailing drug war.

Courtroom media is a longstanding genre of news and entertainment, in radio, film, television, and print. Digital streaming platforms such as YouTube, which boasts over 2 billion users, have become a prominent source of courtroom content. In this research, I examine popularized YouTube sentencing clips: fairly short videos (often no more than a few minutes) which generally include a sentence-reaction formula, have little context (case, social, or individual), and are digitally shared, edited, and distributed online, primarily by news outlets and private channels. Specifically, I conduct a frame analysis of 53 sentencing clips from United States’ courtrooms. I find that sentencing clips reinforce dominant punitive justice frames, including justice-as-retribution, justice-as-victim-advocacy, and justice-as-entertainment. Moreover, as the majority of clips feature defendants sentenced for violent acts, including sexual assault, murder, and child abuse, they depict the ‘worst of the worst’ being brought to justice. Thus, in a time of criminal justice reform, of which there has been popular concern regarding the ‘relatively innocent,’ the criminal bogeyman remains alive and well on digital media platforms like YouTube. Punitive frames associated with the ‘worst of the worst,’ in turn, reinforce a punishment paradigm constitutive of contemporary U.S. criminal justice as a whole.

Drug treatment courts have continued to gain local, state, and national support in the United States. In lieu of incarceration, participants receive treatment and work with a drug court team comprised of treatment specialists and criminal justice actors. Upon program completion, the participant receives a lesser sentence; if the participant does not fulfill requirements, the original charges stand. Given the overlap between medical and criminal views of addiction, drug courts operate through therapeutic surveillance, merging forms of care and control. This article asks: in what ways are participants made to become objects of therapeutic surveillance in drug court? Drawing on narrative criminology, I observed judge-participant interactions in thirty-one drug court sessions in a deindustrialized city in Upstate New York. I find that participants are storied into the program as both a "criminaladdict" (object of control, associated with Black criminality) and a "recovering-addict" (object of care, associated with White middle-class citizenship). This liminal and racialized drug court identity presumes two narrative endings in program completion: social/corporal disposability (prison or death) in criminality and addiction or freedom in productive citizenship. This narrative identity is developed throughout program participation, in admission to the program, progress meetings, and graduation/termination. As criminal justice programs mix punitive and medical approaches, ongoing consideration of identity, narrative, and therapeutic surveillance is warranted.

From 2017 to 2019, I conducted fieldwork on the opioid crisis in upstate New York. As part of my research, I interviewed people who use/d opioids. Interviewees discussed their beginning use, escalating use, and, for many, eventual sobriety. Throughout research, I reflected on my own drug consumption and attempts at moderation and abstinence—mostly regarding my heavy use of alcohol. I tracked my reflections in a field diary, writing over 200 entries. Yet, like many ethnographers, I extracted the notes out of my final research write-up. In part, my lack of disclosure was perhaps due to my being in what James Prochaska and Carlo DiClemente refer to as the contemplation stage of change: I was unsure how to identify myself as a person who uses/struggles with drugs and alcohol, and I was not ready to commit to long-term sobriety. Whether I disclosed or not, such contemplation did affect my fieldwork: it shaped my motivation to pursue drug research and advocacy; my relationships and interactions with participants; and ways I navigated harm reduction and sober support spaces. After over 2 years of being out of the field (and now in a state of long-term sobriety), I revisit my field diary through autoethnographic exploration. In doing so, I place contemplation within the growing conversation on reflexivity and disclosure in critical drug studies.

non-profit Art For Justice (artforjustice.org), has set up paintings in the front of the room, created by people who are incarcerated-all of whom have fought for decades to claim they've been wrongfully convicted. Art is a "a way to give a voice to people who don't have an opportunity for a voice," Ann Marie tells us. "You behold the painting. It's not for entertainment. If you really are present, you come into the painting and bring who you are."

America’s Horror Stories: U.S. History through Dark Tourism conducts a ghost tour(ist) methodology to explore how slavery and racism are represented in dark tourism via ghost tours.

The authors travel to key sites of racist U.S. history, including Salem, Massachusetts, where a witch panic was sparked by accusations of witchcraft by Tituba, an enslaved woman practicing Voodoo; New Orleans, Louisiana, which hosts the largest slave trade market; the Myrtles Plantation in Francisville, Louisiana; and to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where the bloodiest battle of the Civil War took place, marking a pivotal moment to end slavery in the nation—but where Confederate ghosts are said to continue roaming the town and battlefield. Acting as research ghost hunters/tourists, the authors go on walking and bus tours, visit historical monuments, stay at haunted hotels, ponder objects in haunted museums, and do some ghost hunting of their own. They find that the ghosts conjured by tour guides—ghosts of confederate soldiers, American citizens, and enslaved people—tend to whitewash, sensationalize, and commercialize the horrors of U.S. history, including slavery, racism, and colonialism. They do not discount dark tourism entirely; but recommend a ghost tour(ist) pedagogy that critically considers social issues—and structural forms of inequality—that haunt us today.

America’s Horror Stories will be of great interest to students and scholars researching and taking part in critical criminology and cultural criminology courses, specifically on crime, media, and culture.

Access: https://journals.shareok.org/writersccjournal/ojs/writersccjournal/issue/view/7

Flames of (In)Justice is a parable that speaks to ongoing conservative efforts against Critical Race Theory (CRT) in public education. In the parable, fictitious white suburbanites commence an annual Book Burning Day, where they enflame government-designated “Race Books.” They do so in commemoration of legislation that bans “Race Speech,” defined as all speech that mentions race unless during the federally recognized holiday. Otherwise, lawmakers contend, speech that discusses race is discriminatory and divisive in a post-racial society: it threat-ens a nation built on ideals of equality, individualism, and colorblindness. In writ-ing the story, I highlight an enduring truth: of a white investment in colorblind racism not so divided by political lines. Indeed, I wrote the story by drawing on my personal experiences growing up white and learning—or not learning—about race in a predominantly white suburb. As such, I recommend that whites engage in counterstory to elucidate whiteness, not obscure it.