Carceral Public Health: Mapping HIV Public Health Surveillance Systems from the Ground Up


Alexander McClelland, Institute of Criminology and Criminal Justice

This paper reflects my expanding research program examining carcerality or “the carceral” and considers its usefulness for examining coercive public health practices. The concept of carcerality is often narrowly applied to describe the nature of penal systems and punishment. Here however, as a critical scholar interested in ways that criminal legal regulation merges and intersects with public health regulation, I adopt a broader perspective to highlight how carceral logic expands beyond prison walls. In this analysis, I examine how biomaterial and personal information from people living with HIV travels through a range of information management systems across different jurisdictions to enable surveillance in the background, without peoples knowledge and consent, and which intersects with forms of policing and surveillance. This paper is organized into three sections. First, I situate myself within a tradition of literature (that spans from Michel Foucault to Ruha Benjamin) that focus on the ongoing expansion of carceral logic across various sectors of society. Scholars sometimes refer to this expansion as the “carceral continuum” to call attention to less-obvious forms of incarceration and punishment and to highlight how individuals and communities are caught up in the crosshairs of various carceral regimes. Next, I describe ongoing research into the Ontario public health system and forms of carceral public health such as public health orders, including how In some regions, local provincial public health authorities directly access electronic medical records, including viral load and other diagnostics, via a range of diverse databases connected to the Ontario healthcare system, the shelter system, and policing. In this project, I think across critical criminology, abolitionist thought, critical social science studies of public health, science and technology scholarship, and critical race studies in an effort to expose, illuminate and transform how carceral public health practices are enacted, particularly on groups made vulnerable by social structures. Finally, I close by describing our approach to activist research in this project and reflect on how an understanding of some public health practices as “carceral” in nature may be mobilized to contribute to ongoing activist efforts.

This paper will be presented at the following session: