Ebooks for the Classroom+Faculty

Getting Wrecked: Women, Incarceration, and the American Opioid Crisis
ISBN: 9780520966406
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / University of California Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter
Subjects: Women prisoners -- Social aspects -- Massachusetts; Opioid abuse -- Treatment -- Massachusetts;

Getting Wrecked provides a rich ethnographic account of women battling addiction as they cycle through jail, prison, and community treatment programs in Massachusetts. As incarceration has become a predominant American social policy for managing the problem of drug use, including the opioid epidemic, this book examines how prisons and jails have attempted concurrent programs of punishment and treatment to deal with inmates struggling with a diagnosis of substance use disorder. An addiction physician and medical anthropologist, Kimberly Sue powerfully illustrates the impacts of incarceration on women's lives as they seek well-being and better health while confronting lives marked by structural violence, gender inequity, and ongoing trauma.

Kimberly Sue, MD, PhD, is the Medical Director at Harm Reduction Coalition, a national nonprofit organization working to improve the lives and health of people who use drugs. She completed her studies at Harvard Medical School and the Department of Anthropology at Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and completed her medical residency at Massachusetts General Hospital in internal medicine, with a focus on primary care and addiction. She also sees patients at the Rikers Island jail system in New York.