Papers by Kevin Revier
Contemporary Drug Problems, 2022
From 2017 to 2019, I conducted fieldwork on the opioid crisis in upstate New York. As part of my ... more From 2017 to 2019, I conducted fieldwork on the opioid crisis in upstate New York. As part of my research, I interviewed people who use/d opioids. Interviewees discussed their beginning use, escalating use, and, for many, eventual sobriety. Throughout research, I reflected on my own drug consumption and attempts at moderation and abstinence—mostly regarding my heavy use of alcohol. I tracked my reflections in a field diary, writing over 200 entries. Yet, like many ethnographers, I extracted the notes out of my final research write-up. In part, my lack of disclosure was perhaps due to my being in what James Prochaska and Carlo DiClemente refer to as the contemplation stage of change: I was unsure how to identify myself as a person who uses/struggles with drugs and alcohol, and I was not ready to commit to long-term sobriety. Whether I disclosed or not, such contemplation did affect my fieldwork: it shaped my motivation to pursue drug research and advocacy; my relationships and interactions with participants; and ways I navigated harm reduction and sober support spaces. After over 2 years of being out of the field (and now in a state of long-term sobriety), I revisit my field diary through autoethnographic exploration. In doing so, I place contemplation within the growing conversation on reflexivity and disclosure in critical drug studies.
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Critical Criminology, 2021
Drug treatment courts have continued to gain local, state, and national support in the United Sta... more Drug treatment courts have continued to gain local, state, and national support in the United States. In lieu of incarceration, participants receive treatment and work with a drug court team comprised of treatment specialists and criminal justice actors. Upon program completion, the participant receives a lesser sentence; if the participant does not fulfill requirements, the original charges stand. Given the overlap between medical and criminal views of addiction, drug courts operate through therapeutic surveillance, merging forms of care and control. This article asks: in what ways are participants made to become objects of therapeutic surveillance in drug court? Drawing on narrative criminology, I observed judge-participant interactions in thirty-one drug court sessions in a deindustrialized city in Upstate New York. I find that participants are storied into the program as both a "criminaladdict" (object of control, associated with Black criminality) and a "recovering-addict" (object of care, associated with White middle-class citizenship). This liminal and racialized drug court identity presumes two narrative endings in program completion: social/corporal disposability (prison or death) in criminality and addiction or freedom in productive citizenship. This narrative identity is developed throughout program participation, in admission to the program, progress meetings, and graduation/termination. As criminal justice programs mix punitive and medical approaches, ongoing consideration of identity, narrative, and therapeutic surveillance is warranted.
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Contemporary Justice Review, 2021
Courtroom media is a longstanding genre of news and entertainment, in radio, film, television, an... more Courtroom media is a longstanding genre of news and entertainment, in radio, film, television, and print. Digital streaming platforms such as YouTube, which boasts over 2 billion users, have become a prominent source of courtroom content. In this research, I examine popularized YouTube sentencing clips: fairly short videos (often no more than a few minutes) which generally include a sentence-reaction formula, have little context (case, social, or individual), and are digitally shared, edited, and distributed online, primarily by news outlets and private channels. Specifically, I conduct a frame analysis of 53 sentencing clips from United States’ courtrooms. I find that sentencing clips reinforce dominant punitive justice frames, including justice-as-retribution, justice-as-victim-advocacy, and justice-as-entertainment. Moreover, as the majority of clips feature defendants sentenced for violent acts, including sexual assault, murder, and child abuse, they depict the ‘worst of the worst’ being brought to justice. Thus, in a time of criminal justice reform, of which there has been popular concern regarding the ‘relatively innocent,’ the criminal bogeyman remains alive and well on digital media platforms like YouTube. Punitive frames associated with the ‘worst of the worst,’ in turn, reinforce a punishment paradigm constitutive of contemporary U.S. criminal justice as a whole.
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Contemporary Drug Problems, 2020
With a rise in overdose deaths in the United States, opioid awareness has come in a variety of wa... more With a rise in overdose deaths in the United States, opioid awareness has come in a variety of ways. One of these, as reporters suggest, is obituary writing. Obituaries are considered in news media as offering “brutally frank” depictions of addiction that “chronicle the toll of heroin.” Moreover, obituary sharing by parents and loved ones has increasingly taken place on digital platforms, memorial websites expanding the visibility of overdose death while facilitating the building of virtual grief communities. Not solely commemorating individual loss, obituaries thus contain symbolic power—they reflect dominant social values and shape collective memory. As such, overdose obituaries inform how opioid crisis is framed, represented, and addressed. From a qualitative content analysis of 533 opioid-related U.S. obituaries published on Legacy.com and ObitTree.com, I find that while obituaries reduce stigma associated with drug use, addiction, and overdose, they primarily tell white tales of addiction. In affording a white racial framing of drug addiction, obituary writing corresponds with a larger whitewashing of the opioid crisis while implicitly constructing symbolic boundaries between those memorialized, who are predominantly white and middle-class, and those who are deemed as raced and classed Others. Such storytelling, particularly when popularized in news media and made visible on digital platforms, contributes to ongoing systemic inequality in the prevailing drug war.
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Theoretical Criminology, 2018
Police increasingly rely on new media software for public communication and policing operations. ... more Police increasingly rely on new media software for public communication and policing operations. One such software is MobilePatrol: Public Safety App, a free to use mobile phone application marketed by data and analytics company Appriss Safety. It compiles information including mug shot photos, sex offender lists, and most wanted profiles for public access. To capture carceral visuality on the application, I conduct an ethnographic content analysis of police use in upstate New York. I penned a daily user log, took in-app “screenshots”, and analyzed user product reviews. I find that MobilePatrol reinforces an emerging new carceral visibility where an assemblage of police records are rapidly disseminated for widespread consumption, further driving data-led state entrenchment into the public sphere.
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Crime, Media, Culture, 2017
Methamphetamine (“meth”) has received a massive amount of media attention in the United States ov... more Methamphetamine (“meth”) has received a massive amount of media attention in the United States over the last decade. In reporting, journalists, politicians, and police commonly link meth to widespread risk, violence, criminality, and rural decay. Although the rise in meth use, addiction, and crime has been largely overstated, such imagery legitimizes an expansion of surveillance and policing to rural landscapes. In this research, I examine the way meth and meth makers are represented in case coverage of a meth lab fire sited in upstate New York. I find that reporters narrate a more general meth lab “social problem formula story” with caricature villains (meth makers), victims (community members), and heroes (law enforcement and legislators). Significantly, this model of storytelling conveys a distorted and exaggerated understanding of meth as a social problem, turning the atypical meth lab case into the “typical,” while legitimizing law and order solutions. In contributing to the contemporary “methamphetamine imaginary,” this formula story forgoes a structural analysis that considers the prevailing global drug war, rural poverty, or broader capital inequality.
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Book Chapters by Kevin Revier
The Jail Is Everywhere: Fighting the New Geography of Mass Incarceration, 2024
https://www.versobooks.com/products/3039-the-jail-is-everywhere
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After Prisons? Freedom, Decarceration, and Justice Disinvestment, 2016
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Book Reviews by Kevin Revier
Crime Media Culture, 2022
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Journal of Criminal Justice Education, 2020
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Contemporary Justice Review, 2018
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Crime Media Culture, 2018
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Critical Criminology, 2017
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Peace and Conflict Studies, 2013
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Public by Kevin Revier
The Critical Criminologist: Spotlight, 2023
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Truthout, 2023
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Truthout, 2023
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Blog Writing, 2023
https://www.kevinrevier.com/blog-3-1/digging-through-police-budgets
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Filter [w/ Marlie Ford], 2023
https://filtermag.org/social-media-kensington-drugs-zombie/
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CounterPunch, 2023
This writing is a reflection on abolitionism and the recent criminal indictment of Donald Trump. ... more This writing is a reflection on abolitionism and the recent criminal indictment of Donald Trump. Upon hearing the news of his indictment, I, like I am sure many CounterPunch readers, felt a sense of satisfaction. Yet, this did not bode so well with my abolitionist commitments, as, ultimately, any prosecution legitimizes the use of the U.S. prison system--a system that is rooted in a legacy of slavery, lynching, and segregation. I wonder, when we call to abolish prisons, what about Trump?
Read: https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/07/07/when-we-call-to-abolish-prisons-what-about-trump/
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Papers by Kevin Revier
Book Chapters by Kevin Revier
Book Reviews by Kevin Revier
Public by Kevin Revier
Read: https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/07/07/when-we-call-to-abolish-prisons-what-about-trump/
Read: https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/07/07/when-we-call-to-abolish-prisons-what-about-trump/
Read: https://www.arcadia.edu/magazine/