Punitive Rehabilitation?: Addiction, Incarceration, and Recovery

Abstract

While people with substance use issues make up only 8% of the U.S. population, they comprise nearly half of the nation’s prison population. Given the extremity with which incarceration is deployed as a response to addiction, this thesis asks: How does incarceration impact experiences of substance use and recovery, both during and after imprisonment? Criminologists have long examined the intersection of addiction and incarceration, often emphasizing crime as the central link. Meanwhile, critical addiction studies scholars have framed incarceration as a political response to addiction. This thesis seeks to broaden the conceptual foundations of this relationship by centering the lived experiences of those navigating both substance use and incarceration. Drawing on in-depth, semi-structured interviews with formerly incarcerated individuals who have struggled with addiction, this study explores how incarceration shapes the social, economic, mental, and physical dimensions of their lives. Using MaxQDA to conduct thematic coding and employing phenomenological analysis, this research traces how addiction and recovery are experienced across time and institutional space. In doing so, it presents how participants’ needs evolve through their contact with the prison system, the barriers they face in pursuing recovery, and the forms of resistance and agency they enact in response.