Though a rich body of literature examines the causes and consequences of drug criminalization and mass imprisonment in the United States, the majority of these works are situated in urban contexts. Relatively little research considers the effects of aggressive drug control practices on rural residents and non-urban spaces. Focusing on methamphetamine use and control in rural areas, this project examines the nature, extent, and consequences of such practices and provides a theoretical frame to consider how the politics and policies of mass imprisonment extend to rural America.
Ethnographic observation and interview techniques gather data on two distinct populations that collide at the core of the issue. First, interviews and interactions with law enforcement officials helps examine how local authorities respond to and produce knowledge about the "meth epidemic," illustrating why meth remains a top priority for law enforcement despite declining production and use rates. Focusing on meth, which is often viewed as a rural and therefore white phenomenon, also illustrates racialized elements of drug use and the corresponding responses of law enforcement. Second, meth users sentenced to community supervision or participating in community-based drug treatment programs provide insight into the social antecedents of meth use and the consequences of association with the drug.
The project promises a variety of implications for public policy. The research illustrates how community characteristics influence our understanding of drug use and drug users by paying close attention to the differences between rural and urban contexts. Additionally, the unique research populations illustrate differences between treatment and surveillance oriented approaches to meth use. Further, the study provides useful data to inform offender reentry programs in rural communities with limited resources. Ultimately, the project attempts to connect patterns of drug use to broader historical and cultural forces unique to rural communities.
Since the early 1970s, the United States has grown increasingly reliant on the criminal justice system to manage a wide array of social problems. Aggressive drug control policies and an over-reliance on imprisonment helped produce the world's largest prison and correctional population, often described as mass imprisonment. Within this context, the study provides an explanatory account of the political, cultural, and social conditions that encourage states like Kansas to pursue methamphetamine as a major public concern, and to a greater degree than other states with relatively higher meth problems. Ultimately, and most important, the study makes a theoretical contribution by demonstrating how meth control efforts, analogous to previous drug control campaigns, extend punitive drug control rationalities to new cultural contexts and social terrains beyond the so-called ghetto of the inner city, thereby reinforcing and extending the logics of mass imprisonment. The study incorporates a variety of methodologies to investigate meth problem construction in Kansas. A chapter on the "politics of war" traces key development in crime policy, providing a genealogy of the war on drugs, while the segment of "governing through meth" documents how state level authorities and the media participate in social problems attributed to meth. "Crime, difference, and rural life" builds on whiteness studies and considers how starkly racialized narratives underpin mass imprisonment and operate in predominantly white areas as they perceive a crisis of white hegemony. "Gendering the crisis of the present" examines how newspaper constructions of meth crimes are deeply gendered, resulting in disparate treatment of women through motherhood, sexuality, and subordination, while men are portrayed as motivated by a presumed criminal virility and/or a rational viability of the drug trade. Finally, "policing the drug war beyond the ghetto" illustrates cultural beliefs and punitive rationalities at work in the daily activities of police. A plethora of media studies, interviews, observation, and content analysis is detailed in an appendix, which provides valuable substantiation of epistemology and methodologies incorporated in the study. Using Beckett and Sasson's model of criminal justice expansion, Figure 1 exhibits connections among the various components of this study. It is emphasized that the study is not so much a study of rural crime or even a study of methamphetamine. Rather, the study seeks to build a broader understanding of the cultural politics of American criminal justice by viewing our social responses to crime and criminals through the lens of "rural crime" and its most recognizable signifier, methamphetamine. Even though the study employs the nearly unavoidable rural/urban dichotomy, the aim here is not to reify it. Rather, the study rests on the principal understanding that the deleterious effects of so many social problems, including mass imprisonment, significantly and disproportionately affect those marginalized places and people without political voice. In this case, it illuminates the contours of a so-called "rural meth epidemic" and exposes it as a facade that results in a deep system of control, one that is part of a broader carceral project, extending beyond the city and its ghetto into the rural countryside. Recognizing these interrelated systems, of ghetto and country, black and white, large and small, is an important step toward chipping away at its political economy of harm. Ultimately, the hope is that research such as this will encourage politicians and the public to treat racism, sexism, homophobia, and poverty with the same sense of urgency as terrorism, natural disaster, and the "illicit methamphetamine industry."
