Suchergebnisse

The number of people incarcerated in the U.S. now exceeds 2.3 million, due in part to the increasing criminalization of drug use: over 25% of people incarcerated in jails and prisons are there for drug offenses. Judging Addicts examines this increased criminalization of drugs and the medicalization of addiction in the U.S. by focusing on drug courts, where defendants are sent to drug treatment instead of prison. Rebecca Tiger explores how advocates of these courts make their case for what they call "enlightened coercion," detailing how they use medical theories of addiction to justify increase

The number of people incarcerated in the U.S. now exceeds 2.3 million, due in part to the increasing criminalization of drug use: over 25% of people incarcerated in jails and prisons are there for drug offenses. Judging Addicts examines this increased criminalization of drugs and the medicalization of addiction in the U.S. by focusing on drug courts, where defendants are sent to drug treatment instead of prison. Rebecca Tiger explores how advocates of these courts make their case for what they call "enlightened coercion," detailing how they use medical theories of addiction to justify increased criminal justice oversight of defendants who, through this process, are defined as both "sick" and "bad." Tiger shows how these courts fuse punitive and therapeutic approaches to drug use in the name of a "progressive" and "enlightened" approach to addiction. She critiques the medicalization of drug users, showing how the disease designation can complement, rather than contradict, punitive approaches, demonstrating that these courts are neither unprecedented nor unique, and that they contain great potential to expand punitive control over drug users. Tiger argues that the medicalization of addiction has done little to stem the punishment of drug users because of a key conceptual overlap in the medical and punitive approaches—that habitual drug use is a problem that needs to be fixed through sobriety. Judging Addicts presses policymakers to implement humane responses to persistent substance use that remove its control entirely from the criminal justice system and ultimately explores the nature of crime and punishment in the U.S. today.

race is key in constructing drug scares, but by looking at the framing of america's opiate epidemic, class is highlighted as another dividing line between those drug users subjected to or exempted from punitive social control.

Media coverage reflects the conflicted status of drugs in a culture that both valorizes and demonizes their use. Sociologist Rebecca Tiger compares New York Times' coverage of Whitney Houston's death and cyclist Lance Armstrong's "performance enhancing drugs" scandal. Her analysis reveals the particular roles that race and gender play in how elite media and their readers negotiate and construct the morality tale of drug use.

Celebrity gossip blogs, some with millions of readers, are important sites for the interactive construction of addiction. The highly editorial nature of these blogs combined with their low bar to participation make them ideal sites to study how bloggers and readers interpret celebrity drug use. Through a case study of the widely known gossip blogger Perez Hilton's coverage of actress Lindsay Lohan's legal troubles, and reader responses to these stories, I show how interactive discussion of celebrity reinforces dominant constructions of habitual drug use as a form of badness and sickness best treated with jail and coerced treatment. Overall, I argue that new media forms such as celebrity gossip blogs are unlikely but important sites of social problem construction, maintenance and reinvigoration.

Contradictory views of addiction as both sickness and moral failing have resulted in a broken system in which famous substance users (like their everyday counterparts) are bounced between overcrowded jails, prisons, and rehab centers, all with little expectation of "success."