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 argues that the ongoing opioid drug epidemic is the result of an endless cycle in which suffering is medicalized and drug use is criminalized. Drawing on interviews with 80 incarcerated individuals in Missouri correctional institutions, Smirnova shows how contradictions in medical practices, social ideals, and legal policies disproportionately criminalize the poor for their social condition. This criminalization further exacerbates and perpetuates drug addiction and poverty. Tracing the processes by which social issues are constructed as biomedical ones that necessitate pharmacological intervention, Smirnova highlights how inequitable surveillance, policing, and punishment of marginalized populations intensify harms associated with both treatment and punishment, especially given that the distinctions between the two have become blurred. By focusing on the stories of people whose pain and pharmaceutical treatment leads to incarceration, Smirnova challenges the binary of individual and social problems, effectively exploring how the conceptualization, diagnoses, and treatment of substance use may exacerbate outcomes such as relapse, recidivism, poverty, abuse, and death.
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.
Lean Into Tension: How to Grow a Housing Justice Movement.
Under contract with Princeton University Press.
There is a considerable incongruity between the wages people earn, the availability of work that pays a living wage, and the price of healthy and safe housing. The perception is that things are better in midwestern cities like Kansas City than in San Francisco, Boston, or New York.
But that’s not true. In fact, in 2024, rents rose faster in Missouri than in any other state. As the director of the citywide tenant union, Kansas City Tenants, reflects, “when tenants get priced out of a place like New York City or Chicago, they tend to come to places like Kansas City. What happens when people get priced out of Kansas City? Where do they go?” One place they go is to KC Tenants, the self-proclaimed “citywide tenant union in Kansas City” and “an organization led by a multiracial, multigenerational base of poor and working-class tenants in Kansas City” who “organize to ensure that everyone in KC has a safe, accessible, and truly affordable home.” Since 2019, Since then, KC Tenants managed to pass a Tenants Bill of Rights and Ban on Source of Income discrimination—preventing Section 8 voucher-holders, tenants working in the gig economy, or those with poor credit from being discriminated against. They also passed a Right to Counsel, securing free lawyers for any tenant in eviction court, and won a $50 million bond for supporting affordable housing at or below 60% of Area Median Income. KC Tenants has received a lot of local and national attention, including coverage in national outlets like the New York Times and USA Today and the adoption of housing policies by the Biden administration. What is so interesting about KC tenants is not merely this political power, but the other types of power that are less visible, but offer more long-term and revolutionary potential. By drawing from 5 years of ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with 50 leaders with KC Tenants and 15 people working in the broader housing ecosystem I expose these other forms of power and introduce a typology of three distinct forms of power that are won, built, and imagined.
