Former drug detainees in China : arrest, incarceration, and post-released life

Abstract

This is a qualitative research project about the experiences of forty-six former drug detainees who had been incarcerated because of illicit drug use. I examine their painful experiences of being arrested, imprisoned, and their experiences of post-released lives.

I did the formal fieldwork in 2012. I have adopted a qualitative approach for my study. I stayed in Zhiyang for six months and Motai, another Chinese city, for one week in 2012 (both Zhiyang and Motai are not the real name of the cities). In 2013, I went back to Zhiyang again to reconfirm some of the data that I had collected. I had met forty-six former prisoners who were willing to share their stories with me. I have done semi-structured interviews with forty-three of them and participated in their formal and informal social gatherings.

Behind their painful experiences, I would demonstrate, is a fundamental contradiction between the unrealistically ideal Party propaganda, which is made according to “exemplary norms”, and the everyday actual practices of the police officers and the prisoner officers. These realities are based on a variety of practical norms guided by different bureaucratic rules and regulations. Throughout the process, I will show, former drug detainees had suffered from physical pain, shame and degradation instead of being “rehabilitated”. The discussion in this thesis is first and foremost about a failed system of rehabilitation, but also mirrors a more general system of hypocrisy as it unfolds in contemporary China.