Exploring prison drug use in the context of prison-based drug rehabilitation

Abstract

Aims: The research on motivations and meanings associated with drug use in prisons has received little scholarly attention. Particularly, there are few studies analysing drug use in prisons from the perspective of both prisoners and prison officers, and in the context of prison-based drug rehabilitation. This article explores prisoners and prison staffs perceptions on why drug use occurs in prison. Methods: The data is derived from participant observation and qualitative interviews (N = 35) conducted during eight months of ethnographic fieldwork in two drug rehabilitation programmes in a closed Norwegian prison. Findings: Prison staff emphasises drug addiction and prisoners troubled life trajectories when explaining in-prison drug use. Prisoners, on the other hand, explain that drug use can be (a) a way to alleviate some of the pains of imprisonment; (b) an integral part of social life in prison; (c) a route to status in the prisoner community and (d) a defiant way to subvert institutional rules and expectations. Conclusions: Prison staff tends to privilege pre-prison characteristics when explaining prisoners’ drug use, whereas prisoners tend to privilege how the prison context motivates and give meaning to their drug use. Implications for penal policy and practice are discussed.

• Addiction
• criminal justice
• drugs misuse
• ethnography
• illicit drugs
• offenders
• opiate use
• rehabilitation
• subculture
• treatment compliance

Declaration of interest

The author reports no conflicts of interest. The research for this paper was financially supported by The Research Council of Norway, grant no. 202466. I am grateful to the two anonymous reviewers, as well as participants at a research seminar at Uni Research Rokkan Centre in May 2015, for helpful and constructive comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

Notes

¹The growth in prison-based drug rehabilitation services the last 15 years has been remarkable in the Nordic countries (Kolind et al., 2013), yet the programmes reach only a fraction of the total drug using population in Norwegian prisons (Giertsen, 2012).

²The proper names of the prison and the city are withheld for ethical considerations. Similarly, all names of prisoners and prison staff quoted below are pseudonyms.

³When there were more OMT patients than cells in the OMT-unit, patients on buprenorphine had to stay in the most restrictive wing of the prison until a cell became vacant in the OMT unit.