Criminologist Heith Copes gets close to his subjects when he studies meth users in rural Alabama.

Heith Copes, Ph.D., is a professor in the Department of Justice Sciences at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He has served as the President of the Southern Criminal Justice Association and has been a visiting professor at the University of Oslo, University of South Wales, Aalborg University, and the Centre for Alcohol and Drug Research at Aarhus University. He received his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Tennessee in 2001. He is currently working with Jared Ragland on a photo-ethnography in rural Alabama. The project entails interviews, observations, and visual methods to document the lives of people who use methamphetamine in Marshall County, Alabama.

This story originally aired on March 10, 2017.

Story Transcript

So I’m from Lafayette, Louisiana, not too far from here.  But all of my family is from a small town in northern Louisiana near the Mississippi River.  I used to love going there as a child.  It just felt warm.  It was comforting.  It felt safe. 

My grandmother’s house was surrounded by fields of cotton and soybean.  It had a little pea patch for their vegetables.  There's a bayou that ran in front of it.  So it was just a place I really enjoyed. 

Then, as I got older, I started to recognize there's more to these places.  There's kind of a darker side to them.  There's rampant unemployment, there's high poverty, there's economic inequality, and there's a lot of drug use.  And so as a criminologist I often wanted to go back to these small towns and understand why do these people turn to drugs and crime.  But it’s kind of far drive from Birmingham where I live now and so I can’t really make that commute. 

So when I got this opportunity to study methamphetamine use in rural Alabama, I thought, “This is great!  It’s not home, but it’s pretty close.” 

So I started a project, a photo-ethnography.  So I was working with a photographer, Jared Ragland, and our plan was to go up to North Alabama, to Sand Mountain, and document the lives of these people who use methamphetamine.  I would document their lives through their stories.  Jared would do it through the photographs with kind of this larger aim to show the humanity and complexity of their lives.  To see how they make sense of their world, their drug use in the context of addiction and poverty. 

So one night we decided we’re going to stay the night. We wanted to stay the night because these people don’t have typical work schedules.  So we wanted to be kind of around when things happen. 

So around ten o’clock at night we get a call from a friend of ours and he says, “Hey, there's someone I really want you to meet.  He's used meth for about twenty years.  He deals it.  He even cooks it.  And he wants to meet you.”  So we thought this is great.  Let’s do it. 

So we get his address and we start driving up there.  It’s not too far out but far enough that we lose cell phone coverage. 

So we pull into the house and it’s an old trailer.  The porch has been ripped off, and it’s just a series of cement blocks that kind of step up into it.  One side of the trailer is a hand-painted anarchy symbol; the other side is a swastika.  The front is lined with these tall pine trees. One of them looks like there's a noose hanging from it, then there's a hand-painted sign on one side that says, “Not all are welcome.”  On the other side, it says, “Don’t get caught being stupid.” 

So we get out and I look towards the trailer and here’s a shirtless main with Aryan tattoos and a machete.  He jumps off the porch and just makes a beeline straight for us.  There was a moment I thought, Did I just get caught being stupid?