Dominique Robert

Women, the embodiment of health and carceral space

Using the example of women incarcerated in Canada, this paper aims at showing the necessity of studying prisoners’ health and healthcare through a perspective informed both by a criminology of the body and prison/penal sociology. Health is too often constructed as a set of discrete variables that can be isolated from the whole person and her environment. In this paper, we want to show the complexities and richness of situating carceral health and healthcare within the experience of the body and prison. After describing the situation of women in prison in Canada and their health status before incarceration and while in prison, the intricacies of health, healthcare and punishment will be described and we will conclude by showing how health and the body act as a site of control and a site of resistance for incarcerated women.

Governing bullying through the new public health model: a Foucaultian analysis of a school anti-bullying programme

Framed as a public health problem, school bullying led public health agencies to design anti-bullying programmes. The public health approach is invested with hope by those who are looking for an alternative to the punitive logic. Using a Foucaultian approach and a discourse analysis method, this research focuses on the way an anti-bullying intervention programme designed by a public health agency governs school bullying. The findings reveal two major logics at play. Firstly, the programme espouses the new public health model and, accordingly, governs bullying as a systemic risk rather than an individual problem. Secondly, the programme is also anchored in the classical punitive rationality. Public health and punitive logics, far from being mutually exclusive, are rather intertwined. This dual logic contributes to the ‘dangerization’ of school bullying.

The social uses of DNA in the political realm or how politics constructs DNA technology in the fight against crime

Research has shown that the adoption and integration of new technologies in professional environments and daily lives depend less on their objective characteristics and “real” performance than on representations and hopes built into those technologies. This paper will focus on DNA technology and the meanings and expectations invested into it by actors who participated in the debate surrounding two bills on DNA identification in Canada. Through this process, we will uncover the symbolic conditions that allowed for the introduction of the National DNA Databank as a crime-fighting tool: first, the minimization of the power of the substance and the idealization of the DNA databank potentialities; second, the scientification and professionalization of the police through DNA; and third, the reconciliation of Canadas two identities, that of the criminal justice innovator and human rights defender. Those are some of the key symbolic elements that made the creation and expansion of the DNA databank possible.

Toward a slow criminology of sociotechnical orderings: A tale of many youth repellents

Taking the material turn can contribute to renewing the discipline and sustaining the development of a slow criminology. Treating objects as mediators and acknowledging their ontological multiplicities protect us from our reflex to condemn rather than analyze them. Using the example of the ‘youth repellent’, we document three of its instantiations: a spatial fluidity device; a pain delivery mechanism; and an environmental pollution agent. This exploration forces us to expand the borders of the discipline to embrace others such as audiology and epidemiology. While these detours slow our analysis, they are the price we must pay for doing justice to the messiness of the human and non-human associations that constitute the fabric of our world.

Prison and/as Public Health — Prisons and Inmates as Vectors of Health in the New Public Health Era. The Case of Canadian Penitentiaries

In Canada, as in many other countries, prisoners in the penitentiary system1 suffer from the same illnesses as the general population (cardio-vascular diseases, cancer, diabetes, depression, etc.) but in much higher proportions (Wichmann, Serin & Motiuk, 2000; Boothby & Durham, 1999; Hammett & Maruschak, 1999).