Resisting Public Health Surveillance: Anonymous HIV Testing and the Imperative of Health

O’Byrne, Patrick; Bryan, Alyssa

doi:10.24908/ss.v11i1/2.4326

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 20 publications

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“…Epidemiological surveillance has long been embedded in prison settings, albeit unevenly, to determine disease burden and inform disease mitigation efforts (Beaudry et al 2020). The case of monitoring for drug use and signs of drug overdose provides one example where observation for the purposes of health and for institutional order become blurred, reflective of trends regarding the circulation of sensitive health care data among people who use drugs in non-custodial settings and in public health more generally (French 2014;Michaud, van der Meulen, and Guta 2022;O'Byrne and Bryan 2013). Routine practices conducted by health care staff, such as charting or the documentation of medication dispensing, can become accessible to other prison staff under certain circumstances and redeployed for surveillance-related purposes (see Correctional Service of Canada 2022e for the regulations governing information sharing in federal prisons).…”

Section: Carceral Surveillance Literature: Situating the Pnepmentioning

confidence: 99%

“They’re Just Watching You All the Time”: The Surveillance Web of Prison Needle Exchange

Michaud

Meulen

2023

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In 2018, the federal prison authority in Canada began implementing Prison Needle Exchange Programs (PNEPs) at select institutions. Despite longstanding and successful models of prison-based syringe distribution internationally, Canada’s correctional service introduced a highly restrictive security-based approach, placing prisoners who access the program into a surveillance web that implicates diverse actors and relies on methods such as bio-surveillance and security risk assessments. We examine these and other surveillant functions of the PNEP through the first-hand experiences of thirty former prisoners who were incarcerated at one of the prisons with such a program. These experiences point to how the surveillance web is constituted by multiple lines of sight and flows of information across health and security fields. It is further comprised of risk management practices and discretionary punishment carried out by correctional officers as well as the targeting and social sorting of people who use drugs. Former prisoner narratives also demonstrate how the PNEP is reflective of emerging forms of exclusion and processes of securitization that operate through the identification, management, and containment of specific groups. As a whole, the PNEP model implemented in Canada, and the practices that undergird it, target people who use drugs for increased surveillance, resulting in extremely low rates of program enrollment despite pervasive drug use in prison, and undermining access to an essential health care service to which prisoners are entitled. The study findings point to novel forms of carceral surveillance that enmesh observational, technological, and bureaucratic practices, and demonstrate how prisoner health and therapeutic objectives can be subsumed by securitarian logics.

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Section: Carceral Surveillance Literature: Situating the Pnepmentioning

confidence: 99%

“They’re Just Watching You All the Time”: The Surveillance Web of Prison Needle Exchange

Michaud

Meulen

2023

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Active-offer PrEP for HIV prevention: control, discipline, and public health nursing practice

O’Byrne

Orser

Haines

et al. 2019

Critical Public Health

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The Evolution of HIV Prevention

O’Byrne

Jacob²

2019

Advances in Nursing Science

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HIV prevention has changed since the identification of AIDS in 1981, the discovery of HIV in 1983, and the rollout of HIV antibody testing in 1985. Since this time, HIV prevention changed from behavior modification to testing to treatment as prevention to chemoprophylaxis using HIV medications among HIV-negative persons. While these modifications have been heralded as public health successes, critical evaluations are needed. In this article, we present one such review in which we argue that HIV prevention, while previously disciplinary in the Foucauldian sense, has become controlling in the Deleuzian sense. In this way, the parameters of context are targeted and behavior change is less relevant. This highlights the importance of questioning public health “advancements” and using novel theoretical lens to do so.

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Resisting Public Health Surveillance: Anonymous HIV Testing and the Imperative of Health

Cited by 3 publications

References 20 publications

“They’re Just Watching You All the Time”: The Surveillance Web of Prison Needle Exchange

“They’re Just Watching You All the Time”: The Surveillance Web of Prison Needle Exchange

Active-offer PrEP for HIV prevention: control, discipline, and public health nursing practice

The Evolution of HIV Prevention

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