CSLS Speaker Series: “Policing Patients: Treatment and Surveillance on the Frontlines of the Opioid Crisis”

Featuring Liz Chiarello, Associate Professor of Sociology, Washington University in Saint Louis

Abstract: Sociologists and socio-legal scholars have long been fascinated by how social fields transform social problems. They have shown the mechanisms by which problems are designated “sickness” versus “badness” and how those designations change over time. However, scholars have paid less attention to how social problems transform social fields, how fields themselves change when they take certain problems under their purview. The U.S. has spent the last two decades caught in the worst overdose crisis this country has ever seen. Efforts to curb the crisis primarily come from two fields—healthcare and criminal justice—that enlist different actors and bring different logics and tactics to bear. In Policing Patients: Treatment and Surveillance on the Frontlines of the Opioid Crisis, Elizabeth Chiarello uses the contemporary U.S. opioid crisis as a focal case for examining how two fields—healthcare and criminal justice—contend with the same social problem and how doing so affects dynamics in each field. Drawing on 337 interviews conducted with healthcare providers and enforcement agents in eight states, Chiarello reveals how prescription drug monitoring programs (PDMPs), surveillance technologies shared across the two fields operate as “Trojan horse technologies” that transport enforcement logics into healthcare. Technology use helps enforcement agents encroach on medical territory; it also helps to transform healthcare fields by refocusing workers’ attention away from treatment and care and toward surveillance and punishment. Chiarello uses these findings to theorize about the micro-level dynamics of field change and offer policy prescriptions grounded in harm reduction, treatment, and prevention.

Reception: Lunch 12:15-12:45p.m. in the Kadish Library 
Program: 12:45-2:00p.m. in the Philip Selznick Seminar Room

Register here for the livestream via Zoom.    

Cosponsored with the Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice

If you require an accommodation for effective communication (ASL interpreting/CART captioning, alternative media formats, etc.) to fully participate in this event, please contact csls@law.berkeley.edu with as much advance notice as possible and at least 7 days in advance of the event.