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.

About the Author

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.

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Author’s Note

1 Introduction: “It’s Just Part of the Game”
2 The Beauty Shop and the Segregation Unit
3 Heroin Is My Counselor
4 Discipline, Punish, and Treat Trauma?
5 Where Medicine Is Contraband
6 Recovery Is My Job Now
7 Life and Death after Jail
8 Conclusion: Breaking “Wicked Bad Habits”

Notes
References
Index

Reviews

"In this volume [Sue] offers an eye-opening account of the gendered dimensions of the 'War on Drugs.'—Highly recommended"
— CHOICE

"Sue demonstrates empathy for the women she has come to know, as well as realism regarding the harshness of their circumstances."
— Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Books

“Kimberly Sue has written the broadest and deepest ethnography I have read of the lived experience of poor women in the American opioid crisis. This fine book will disturb and distress the reader by forcing him or her to walk with these abused women from the dangerous streets to the dysfunctional prisons to the inadequate treatment programs and back, again and again. It is a terrible indictment, but one that makes a convincing case for all that must be done to end the havoc and rebuild human lives. A remarkable achievement.”—Arthur Kleinman, author of The Soul of Care

“There are few prison ethnographies of note, let alone any that deal with women. Making a unique contribution, Sue combines a focus on women, drug abuse, and criminalization to explore the issue of prisons as sites of drug rehabilitation for women in the northeastern United States. Accessible to readers from many backgrounds, this book allows us to see issues both inside and outside prison, a connection that too many studies fail to make.”—James B. Waldram, author of Hound Pound Narrative: Sexual Offender Habilitation and the Anthropology of Therapeutic Intervention

“Getting Wrecked is a unique and vivid portrait of the lives, hopes, and agony of women in prison in the United States. Sue powerfully conveys the strength and resolve of women facing societal-level racism, privatized prisons, addiction, and poverty. This poignant book should be read by everyone who cares about social inequalities, discrimination, gender, health, incarceration, and addiction.”—Seth M. Holmes, author of Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies

About the Book

About the Author

Table of Contents

Reviews