“They’re Just Watching You All the Time”: The Surveillance Web of Prison Needle Exchange
Bibliographic record
Abstract
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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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".