Kevin Revier's "Policing Pain"

Kevin Revier is an assistant professor of criminology in the department of sociology/anthropology at the State University of New York at Cortland.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Policing Pain: The Opioid Crisis, Abolition, and a New Ethic of Care, and reported the following:

Page 99 begins with a quote:

“Because we know that when addicts go to jail, if they don’t get treatment, if they don’t start on something, they go out, and they have such a high rate of dying the next time they use, because their bodies aren’t used to—because they haven’t used, and then they go use again, and they think they can use as much as they—and then they die.”

This is from my interview with the DSS/mental health commissioner in Broome County in Central New York. She comes after a string of quotes, where I cite the county’s district attorney and the emergency medical services coordinator who cited the same condition: people who use drugs are being locked up, they do not have treatment access inside the jail or upon release, and they overdose.

Yet, while officials discussed the risks involved for incarcerating people who use drugs, their solutions remained largely carceral-focused: add treatment to the jail and in reentry services.

Page 99 indeed represents the crux of Policing Pain: that while seemingly a reversal of the lock-em-up approaches to the drug war, public officials’ calls for treatment have tended to centralize treatment within jails, drug courts, and police programming. This creates harm, as jails, as this chapter discusses, are fundamentally places of degradation and abuse, both in terms of interpersonal violence by correctional officers and institutional violence, such as strip searches.

Importantly, page 99 also marks a shift in the book, where I move from an overview of what I deem as carceral care in police, courts, and jail treatment to envisioning what a new ethics of care looks like, abolitionist care.

Visit Kevin Revier's website.

--Marshal Zeringue