An historical review of racial bias in prison-based substance abuse treatment design

ABSTRACT

This study leverages critical race and legal epidemiological frameworks to illustrate the race-based historical evolution of U.S. rehabilitation paradigms directed at imprisoned heroin and opioid users. What began as a racist early-20th-century federal antinarcotic trafficking effort has since assumed a state-based treatment agenda whose programmatic operations are largely based in correctional settings disproportionately reserved for poor substance abusers of color. Even in contemporary carceral facilities, where incarcerated populations are teeming with White addicts, in the aggregate, White drug abusers have been protected from the depraved, incorrigible, and inherently pathological drug-using caricature assigned to their non-White counterparts. This historical examination demonstrates how links between broader drug policy and prison-based drug treatment support a legally codified White supremacist narrative that erodes health and wellbeing for program participants of color, and the communities to which they inevitably return.

KEYWORDS:

• Critical race theory
• heroin/opioids
• legal epidemiology
• prison-based programs
• substance abuse treatment

Notes

Pub. L. 114–198.

Pub. L. 63–223, 38 Stat. 785 (repealed).

Pub. L. 70–672.

Pub. L. 82–255.

Pub. L. 728–84.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the University of Pennsylvania.