Date: 21 Nov 2013
Beyond the Ghetto: Police Power, Methamphetamine
and the Rural War on Drugs
Abstract
Viewing police as important cultural producers, we ask how police power
fashions structures of feeling and social imaginaries of the “war on drugs” in
small towns of the rural Midwest. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and a
collection of interviews focusing on police officers’ beliefs about the causes
of crime and drug use, we locate a narrative of rural decline attributed to the
producers and users of methamphetamine. We argue this narrative supports
punitive and authoritarian sensibilities and broader narcopolitical projects
more generally and ignores long-standing social inequalities observed in rural
communities. As such, the cultural work of rural police provides important
insight to the shape and direction of late-modern crime control beyond the familiar
terrains of the city and its “ghetto.”
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