Allison McKim, Addicted to Rehab: Race, Gender, and Drugs in the Era of Mass Incarceration.

• Author: Selman, Kaitlyn J.
• Position: Book review

Allison McKim, Addicted to Rehab: Race, Gender, and Drugs in the Era of Mass Incarceration (Rutgers University Press, 201 7)

IN ADDICTED TO REHAB: RACE, GENDER, AND DRUGS IN THE ERA OF MASS Incarceration, Allison McKim highlights the complex ways in which addiction is used to govern women's lives. To illustrate the various expressions of addiction and treatment philosophy, McKim employs a comparative ethnographic study of two residential women's rehabilitation programs--a publicly funded penal rehab program and a private-pay facility. Through her analysis of Women's Treatment Services and Gladstone Lodge, McKim takes the reader through the divergent pathways to these programs, the different definitions of addiction that the programs employ, and the opposing treatment structures women encounter. Building on existing governance literature, McKim shows how governing through addiction both derives from and works to reproduce unequal racialized, classed, and gendered ideologies through techniques of punitive social control. What results is a bifurcated rehab structure in which the type of treatment a woman receives is largely dependent on her race and class. In contrasting the two programs, McKim exposes the repackaging of penal logics into addiction and treatment discourse, thus illustrating the ability of the penal state to reproduce marginality through exclusion, surveillance, and punishment beyond the prison.

In the introductory chapter, McKim familiarizes the reader with the field of rehabilitation and its relationship with deviance and the penal state. Historically, institutions like prisons and asylums have been tasked with managing particular populations through strategies of exclusion, surveillance, stigmatization, and coercion. McKim argues that we see a similar phenomenon when we interrogate institutions that deal with addiction; thus," We are also governing through addiction" (9). Inspired by Simon's (2007) notion of governing through crime, governing through addiction is the major orienting framework for the book. For McKim, governing through addiction refers to "the process whereby logics and techniques from the addiction recovery field underpin how we think about and act on social relations," an approach that is "most deeply rooted in punishment" (9). Although punishment is an important tool for social control, governing through addiction is not limited to prisons and jails. Extending the work of carceral state scholars such as Beckett and Murakawa (2012), McKim argues that the penal state is adaptable...