NCJ Number
244974
Journal
British Journal of Criminology Volume: 53 Issue: 4 Dated: July 2013 Pages: 605-623
Date Published
July 2013
Length
19 pages
Annotation
This article discusses an image-based methamphetamine (meth) intervention program in the United States, to reveal disparate images of meth users.
Abstract
This article takes aim at an image-based methamphetamine (meth) intervention program in the United States, to reveal disparate images of meth users organized along a binary system of value, pitting the sexual vulnerabilities of young women against the violent predation of young men. The authors argue the program structures a particular visual or way of seeing the supposed ills of meth use that agitates White middle-class social anxieties, through a 'meth epidemic' unfairly imagined as 'White' and 'rural'. Following self-justifying drug war logics, the project battles an epidemic it helps to create and sustain. Thus, the authors see the program as an important site of cultural production where its punitive visuals contribute to structures of ideological penal policies and practices or 'imaginary penalties' that obfuscate alternatives for harm reduction and the ills of the neo-liberal order. (Published Abstract)