'With Scenes of Blood and Pain': Crime Control and the Punitive Imagination of The Meth Project

Abstract

This article takes aim at an image-based methamphetamine (meth) intervention programme in the United States, to reveal disparate images of meth users organized along a binary system of value, pitting the sexual vulnerabilities of young women against the violent predation of young men. We argue the programme structures a particular visuality or way of seeing the supposed ills of meth use that agitates white middle-class social anxieties, through a ‘meth epidemic’ unfairly imagined as ‘white’ and ‘rural’. Following self-justifying drug war logics, the project battles an epidemic it helps to create and sustain. Thus, we see the programme as an important site of cultural production where its punitive visualities contribute to structures of ideological penal policies and practices or ‘imaginary penalities’ that obfuscate alternatives for harm reduction and the ills of the neo-liberal order.