William Garriott is Professor and Chair of the Law, Politics, and Society Program at Drake University. Trained in anthropology, he writes about policing, drug policy, and criminal justice reform for an interdisciplinary audience.
He is the author of Policing Methamphetamine as well as several books and articles on policing, criminology, drug policy, ethnography, and criminal justice.
He is currently completing a book about marijuana legalization and criminal justice reform in Colorado.
At Drake he teaches courses such as Drugs, Law, and Society, Crime and Film, and Justice Reform.
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Publications
Policing Methamphetamine:
Narcopolitics in Rural America
In its steady march across the United States, methamphetamine has become, to quote former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, “the most dangerous drug in America.
Addiction Trajectories
Bringing anthropological perspectives to bear on addiction, the contributors to this important collection highlight the contingency of addiction as a category of human knowledge and experience.
Policing and Contemporary Governance
This volume draws attention to the centrality of police and policing to the project of governance and the experience of being human in the contemporary world.
The Anthropology of Police
Even beyond the methodological particularities and geographic breadth of cultural anthropology, there are a set of conceptual and analytical traditions that have much to bring to broader scholarship in police studies.
Interviews, Podcasts, and More
This conversation between Dr. Garriott and Dr. Hooker, alongside series co-hosts Dr. Julia Kowalski and Dr. Katherine Martineau, addresses race, policing, and incarceration in the United States, and especially the profound impacts of the “war on drugs.” Dr. Garriott and Dr. Hooker share their different perspectives on the role of narrative in shaping local ideas of “justice,” and how racial equity can become a focus of activity in state institutions.
Podcasts
Here We Are Podcast with Shane Mauss. Episode 108: Addiction + Narcopolitics, William Garriott
What Does Justice Sound Like? | Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association | 2021
Testimonials
“Reveals how addiction is remaking rural America despite four decades of a & war on drugs. Garriott explores the day-to-day costs of policing drugs in a society increasingly organized around the illicit and the high. Compassionate and relentless, he demonstrates the brutal reality of narcopolitics in the United States. Essential reading.”
— Joseph Masco,The University of Chicago on Policing Methamphetamine:
Narcopolitics in Rural America
“I would highly recommend the book especially to readers within anthropology and other related disciplines, who are interested in addiction, diseases, illnesses, and also in organizing ideas of what it means to be human: these ideas assume specificity in different historical and spatial settings, as they are related to political and commercial histories of pharmaceuticals and illegal drugs and their translations and transformations.”
— Bjarke Nielsen, Ethnos on Addiction Trajectories
“This book is an important contribution to the anthropology of drug use…it conveys a real sense of the bleakness and intractability of the problem, as well as the ultimate failure of policy and practice to meet this challenge.”
— Gilbert Quintero, Anthropological Quarterly on Policing Methamphetamine:
Narcopolitics in Rural America
William Garriott 