Tales of ‘Heroes’ and ‘Saviours’

This chapter, with examples from the mass media, outlines how the image of the police officers and prison officers is presented in party propaganda. Different ‘model’ officers are presented in ways highlighting their ‘exemplary qualities’, like their willingness to sacrifice self for public good, and emphasizing their heroic and benevolent personal characteristics. It examines how the party propaganda might affect drug detainees’ expectations of the police and prison officers in real life.

Initiation Ceremony in Drug Detention

This chapter further examines former prisoners’ experiences in the early phase of their imprisonment. With the example of the prison culture of ‘initiation ceremonies’, it argues that prison officers’ concern of maintaining control and order in the prison goes beyond producing the form of structural hypocrisy discussed in the previous chapter and actually forces former prisoners to act in hypocritical ways themselves. What should have been a process of learning and rehabilitation through education turns instead into a veritable culture of hypocrisy.

Police and the ‘Hooks’

This chapter examines former prisoners’ experiences of being arrested and their views on the police officers who arrest them. With the example of the use of informants, which the former prisoners called ‘hooking’, it argues that the police officers’ concern for intelligence collection and meeting arrest quotas had overridden the concern for ‘saving the drug addicts’. The former drug detainees were exposed to the media presentation of ‘model police officers’ on the front stage and the actual practices of ‘hooking’ on the backstage simultaneously. It argues that this had contributed to their feelings of injustice and to a structural system of hypocrisy formed by the material circumstances of the prison as well as outside bureaucratic performance criteria like the arrest quota and different types of performance measurements linked to the daily police operation.

Introduction

This book tells the story of Chinese drug detainees who have been incarcerated for illicit drug use. It documents their experiences of being arrested and imprisoned as well as their lives after release. Behind their painful experiences is a fundamental contradiction between the unrealistically ideal party propaganda, which is made according to ‘exemplary norms’ (Bakken 2000), and the actual everyday practices of police officers and detention facility and prison officers, which are based on a variety of practical norms guided by different bureaucratic rules and regulations. This book is first and foremost about a failed system of rehabilitation, but also bears on a more general system that drug detainees perceive as hypocritical in contemporary China.

Conclusion

It concludes that besides the failure of rehabilitation, it’s also the discrepancy of party propaganda and the practical reality.

Prison Authority and the ‘Inmate Elites’

This chapter examines former drug detainees’ experiences of everyday life in the prisons. I look specifically at the power relationship between the detention officers and the powerful inmates (whom I referred to as the ‘inmate elites’) in laojiao/qiangge. On the basis of their power relations, this chapter argues that the prison officers’ concerns for maintaining control and the pressure on making profit had far superseded the concerns for drug rehabilitation. This further added to the former prisoners’ feelings of unfairness and injustice and more deeply entrenched the systematic hypocrisy.

Post-discharge Reintegration and Surveillance

This chapter frames drug detainees’ experience in a more general context of the policing of ‘targeted populations’. In China, all released prisoners, including those discussed in this study, are categorized as ‘targeted populations’. Different policies are made to manage, control, and obtain information about such ‘targeted populations’. Since most of these former prisoners were incarcerated because of drug use, many of these control techniques are concerned with the control of former and current drug users. With the example of four control techniques, it demonstrates how the concern for control hijacks the concern for education and reintegration and destroys the police’s image of ‘benevolent saviours’.