The Prescription to Prison Pipeline: The Medicalization and Criminalization of Pain (2023)
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
In The Prescription-to-Prison Pipeline, Michelle Smirnova shows how the opioid epidemic is fueled by a vicious cycle: pain is medicalized, drug use is criminalized, and the poor are punished for their suffering. Based on interviews with 80 incarcerated Missourians, she reveals how medicine, law, and social ideals collide to turn treatment into punishment and poverty into crime. By centering the voices of people whose prescribed relief led to incarceration, Smirnova exposes how systems meant to heal instead deepen addiction, recidivism, and inequality.
The Prescription-to-Prison Pipeline was reviewed in the American Journal of Sociology, the Journal of Historical Behavioral Science, Family Medicine, and the Journal of Anthropological Research, featured in Inquest, Work in Progress, and WUSTL’s The Source and Smirnova was hosted on KPFA’s Law & Disorder, The Annex, The New Books, and Infectious Historians podcasts.
Tenant Power: The Fight for Housing Justice. (2027)
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Across the country, rent has skyrocketed while wages have stagnated, leaving millions of people—especially working-class, Black, Latine, and immigrant tenants—struggling to stay housed. KC Tenants, a multiracial and multigenerational tenant union in Kansas City, has achieved significant policy victories. Organizing at the site of tenancy allows for a deeply localized approach, one that forges trusting relationships attentive to the nuance and granularity of individuals' issues, while also enabling a coalitional upscaling that connects tenant unions and tenant advocacy organizations worldwide. Building power among tenants offers a revolutionary approach and a transformative set of possibilities that transcends artificially constructed divisions between people and spheres of social life. This book traces how one tenant union exemplifies this process.
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Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Across the country, rent has skyrocketed while wages have stagnated, leaving millions of people—especially working-class, Black, Latine, and immigrant tenants—struggling to stay housed. KC Tenants, a multiracial and multigenerational tenant union in Kansas City, has achieved significant policy victories. Organizing at the site of tenancy allows for a deeply localized approach, one that forges trusting relationships attentive to the nuance and granularity of individuals' issues, while also enabling a coalitional upscaling that connects tenant unions and tenant advocacy organizations worldwide. Building power among tenants offers a revolutionary approach and a transformative set of possibilities that transcends artificially constructed divisions between people and spheres of social life. This book traces how one tenant union exemplifies this process.
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Photo: KC Defender / Cassandra Gillig
