Policing Pain
The Opioid Crisis, Abolition, and a New Ethic of Care
Published on 11. November 2025
Book
Paperback/Softback
240 pages
978-1-4798-2895-1 (ISBN)
Description
How the medicalization of addiction during the U.S. opioid crisis has driven mass incarceration and mass policing in rural and deindustrialized communities
The nationwide opioid public health emergency has led many advocates and public officials to call for drug policy reforms that reject traditional "law-and-order" approaches. In Policing Pain, Kevin Revier approaches the opioid epidemic from an abolitionist framework that seeks to treat people who use opioids not as so-called criminals, but as people in need of health care. Based on two years of ethnographic research in Upstate New York, a region highly impacted by overdoses, job loss, and deindustrialization, Revier shows that incorporation of treatment within the criminal justice system has ultimately expanded the scope of the drug war, turning individuals into "treatable carceral subjects" who are both medicalized and criminalized.
He argues that the incorporation of medical rhetoric and treatment within the criminal legal system maintains a carceral approach in rural and low-income areas facing high rates of opioid overdose and economic disinvestment, further entrenching the carceral state in the lives of people who use drugs. Ultimately, Policing Pain explores alternative strategies to promote harm reduction from an abolitionist ethic of care that advocates for people who use drugs while seeking to minimize criminal justice involvement in drug-related issues.
The nationwide opioid public health emergency has led many advocates and public officials to call for drug policy reforms that reject traditional "law-and-order" approaches. In Policing Pain, Kevin Revier approaches the opioid epidemic from an abolitionist framework that seeks to treat people who use opioids not as so-called criminals, but as people in need of health care. Based on two years of ethnographic research in Upstate New York, a region highly impacted by overdoses, job loss, and deindustrialization, Revier shows that incorporation of treatment within the criminal justice system has ultimately expanded the scope of the drug war, turning individuals into "treatable carceral subjects" who are both medicalized and criminalized.
He argues that the incorporation of medical rhetoric and treatment within the criminal legal system maintains a carceral approach in rural and low-income areas facing high rates of opioid overdose and economic disinvestment, further entrenching the carceral state in the lives of people who use drugs. Ultimately, Policing Pain explores alternative strategies to promote harm reduction from an abolitionist ethic of care that advocates for people who use drugs while seeking to minimize criminal justice involvement in drug-related issues.
Reviews / Votes
"Kevin Revier's insightful ethnographic case study combined with an abolitionist epistemology compels us to demand alternatives to incarceration that aren't rooted in treatment modalities that reproduce the logics and practices of punishment and the erasure of structural explanations. He shows in excruciating detail how drug courts and jail treatment programs are part of the problem, not the solution, and lays out a vision for a more just path forward." - Alex Vitale, author of The End of Policing"Policing Pain is a bold, nuanced, and incisive chronicle of the perilous contradictions of making cops, judges, prison wardens and guards 'care' for people who use drugs." - Nancy D. Campbell, author of OD: Naloxone and the Politics of Overdose
"Policing Pain exposes how policing, courts, and jails have absorbed the language of care while upholding racialized control and punishment. Through abolitionist analysis and rich ethnography, Revier reveals how carceral power has adapted, medicalized, and deepened its reach. This is a vital book for anyone seeking to understand the entwined histories of racial capitalism, drug prohibition, and the urgent need for abolitionist care." - Kerwin Kaye, author of Enforcing Freedom: Drug Courts, Therapeutic Communities, and the Intimacies of the State
"Revier wisely reminds us how carceral societies treat addiction like a problem to be policed, rather than a need for healing justice and harm reduction. Meticulously researched, written with passion and suffused with the author's vivid abolitionist imagination, Policing Pain makes for compulsory reading for anyone interested in how states arrest their way out of the crises they create and why freedom dreaming and social justice seeking are the only humane response." - Lambros Fatsis, co-author of Policing the Pandemic: How Public Health Becomes Public Order
"In his intimate portrait of yet another 'drug crisis,' Revier shows that despite reports of its demise, the drug war is indeed alive and well. While attentive to the pain and suffering of those left in the drug war's wake, Revier charts a hopeful path forward. Not only a vivid account of the present, Policing Pain is essential reading for the crises to come." - Travis Linnemann, author of The Horror of Police
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
New York
United States
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
Thickness: 20 mm
Weight
363 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-4798-2895-1 (9781479828951)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
E-Book
11/2025
NYU Press
€20.49
Available for download
Person
Kevin Revier is Assistant Professor in the Sociology/Anthropology Department at SUNY Cortland.