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The United States and its criminal-legal system have had a historically turbulent relationship with drugs and substance use. Public rhetoric, political ideology, and resulting policies, shaped by both rehabilitative and punitive ideals, have served as a foundation for the criminalization and mass incarceration of those who possess, distribute, and use illegal drugs—especially the targeting and blaming of communities of color. Early on, although drugs such as opium had versatile medical benefits, the use of heroin, crack/cocaine, and cannabis by people of color was quickly shaped into a discourse that amplified fear and racist stereotypes and catalyzed the War on Drugs. Throughout several presidential administrations, the criminalization of drug crimes disproportionately affected Black individuals, despite White citizens using them at similar or higher rates. “Tough on crime” policies, policing, and sentencing that resulted from this period culminated in the mass imprisonment of people of color. Trying to repair the harm caused by the War on Drugs and rhetoric from the media in 2024, there is a strong push for the decriminalization and legalization of several drugs across the United States. For cannabis in particular, efforts have been made to advocate for its legalization federally. In the criminal-legal system, many political leaders and legislators have actively attempted to advocate for and enforce policies that release individuals from prison who have been incarcerated for minor drug offenses or are affected by unjust sentencing practices. Combined with nationwide efforts to promote research on the use of drugs for medicinal purposes, as well as the problems of drug abuse and addiction, a more progressive and optimistic approach to drug use has begun and continues to grow across the United States. The social and political forces that have historically shaped attitudes toward drug use and punishment are crucial to understanding the direction of U.S. drug policies in the early 21st century and why the pendulum continues to swing.

In the 21st century, an unprecedented rise in the visibility of and social acceptance for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people has been accompanied by exponential growth in scholarship on LGBT people generally and their experiences in diverse communities and institutional contexts in the United States and around the globe. A growing body of literature draws on first-person accounts, qualitative analyses, and statistical assessments to understand how and why LGBT people end up in prisons and other types of lock-up facilities, as well as how they experience being imprisoned and the collateral consequences of those experiences. Scholarship in this body of work focuses on (a) the range of abuses inflicted on LGBT prisoners by other prisoners and state officials alike, including mistreatment now widely recognized as human rights violations; (b) the variety of ways LGBT people are managed by prison officials, in the first instance whether their housing arrangements in prison are integrationist, segregationist, and/or some combination of both, including the temporary and permanent isolation of LGBT prisoners; and (c) the range of types of political mobilization that expose the status quo as unacceptable, define, and document the treatment of LGBT people behind bars as human rights violations, demand change, and advocate new policies and practices related to the carceral state’s treatment of LGBT people in the United States and across the globe. The study of LGBT people in prisons and other detention facilities is compatible with larger calls for the inclusion of sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression in criminology and criminal justice research by advancing theoretical and empirical understandings of LGBT populations as they interact with the criminal justice system, and by incorporating this knowledge into broader criminological conversations.