The poverty of death: social class, urban deprivation, and the criminological consequences of sequestration of death

An increasing number of sociologists are concerned with the sequestration of death, dying, and bereavement and its apparent revival. Sequestration theorists emphasize how the exclusion of death from everyday life has allowed individuals to put aside the reality-threatening potential of death and thereby ordinarily maintain a sense of meaningfulness. Although revival theorists do not argue with the fundamentals of the sequestration thesis, they emphasize how “technologies of the self” are being developed to help individuals face rather than avoid death when it comes. They also acknowledge take-up of these helpful technologies is largely confined to middle-class people. That said, it is significant that few research studies have specifically sought to understand how working class people do or do not cope with bereavement. This paper partly fills this gap in knowledge by presenting research evidence of the links between bereavement and heroin use in deprived urban areas. Although heroin use is known to concentrate in deprived urban areas, a key finding was that an empirically significant number of my respondents living in such areas only commenced heroin use to help them cope with bereavement. Insights are drawn from the sociology of death, dying, and bereavement literature to make sense of the testimonies of these respondents.