The poverty of death: social class, urban deprivation, and the criminological consequences of sequestration of death

Abstract

An increasing number of sociologists are concerned with the sequestration of death, dying, and bereavement and its apparent revival. Sequestration theorists emphasize how the exclusion of death from everyday life has allowed individuals to put aside the reality-threatening potential of death and thereby ordinarily maintain a sense of meaningfulness. Although revival theorists do not argue with the fundamentals of the sequestration thesis, they emphasize how “technologies of the self” are being developed to help individuals face rather than avoid death when it comes. They also acknowledge take-up of these helpful technologies is largely confined to middle-class people. That said, it is significant that few research studies have specifically sought to understand how working class people do or do not cope with bereavement. This paper partly fills this gap in knowledge by presenting research evidence of the links between bereavement and heroin use in deprived urban areas. Although heroin use is known to concentrate in deprived urban areas, a key finding was that an empirically significant number of my respondents living in such areas only commenced heroin use to help them cope with bereavement. Insights are drawn from the sociology of death, dying, and bereavement literature to make sense of the testimonies of these respondents.

Keywords:

• Urban deprivation
• social class
• working class
• bereavement
• heroin
• criminology

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Dr. Julie Rugg and the peer-reviewers for providing insightful comments that have enabled me to improve my paper. I must also thank them for being so positive about my paper. Their generous encouragement was important to me as an “outsider” seeking to make a contribution to the death studies community but, given my obvious limitations as an outsider, unsure about whether I actually had something worthwhile to contribute.

Notes

[1] Interest in the sociology of bereavement is more recent than interest in the sociology of death and dying, which is longstanding. Interest in developing the sociology of bereavement emerged in response to a general concern at the “lack of a sociology of bereavement …. [which is] still overwhelmingly medicalized and pathologized” (Walter, 1998).

[2] See Savage et al. (1992) for a fully elaborated definition of this “new middle class.”

[3] A total of 44 interviews were undertaken during the study. The remaining 18 interviewees were using drugs other than heroin (e.g., LSD, ecstasy, cannabis) and have been excluded from the analysis because they did not mention bereavement during interviews about their criminal careers.

[4] Albeit they are concerned that hospice is now becoming just as institutionalized and bureaucratized.

[5] The legitimacy of new late modern institutions of death (e.g., hospice, expressive professions) is based on the notion that they seek to help the dying or bereaved individual to come to terms with death in a more open, and thus psychologically healthy, manner. However, critics of these new institutions of death suggest that they are simply underpinned by a new form of politics, based on “awareness,” and that this carries just as many dangers as the modern way of death. For Hart et al. (1988) then, hospice is based on an ideology of “the good death” which, as a socially approved way of dying underpinned by powerfully prescribed behavioural norms, acts as a disciplinary technology that marginalizes those that want to die in an “unacceptable” fashion. Similarly, Arnason and Hafsteinsson (2003) argue that bereavement counselling is less about the freedom to express thoughts and emotions but, rather, can be understood as an expression of neo-liberal governmentality designed to engage the self-activating capacities of bereaved individuals so that they are better able to isolate, act upon, and control their own subjectivity, thereby protecting others from their pain. Thus, through a process of self-examination that precedes and accompanies speech, and by providing the obligation to speak words that are “true” to an inner reality, one becomes a subject for oneself; the thing to be subject to self-monitoring, surveillance, and control.

[6] This is exemplified in the tendency for government departments to collect mortality statistics concerning heroin related deaths.