The cordon carcéral? Reflections on an emerging dispossessive regime in public health

Keywords: Housing, public health, cordon carceral, dispossession, anti-racism
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

In critical housing studies, the ongoing role of public health in policing racial property regimes has been under scrutinized. Previous scholarship has implicated early 20th century colonial public health bureaucracies in the emergence of the cordon sanitaire that, in places like Vancouver, utilized the moral/scientific carceral logics of sanitary science to justify the enclosure, dispossession, and banishment of generations of Indigenous and Asian Diasporic communities. In more recent work, we have shown how a new health care crisis prompted a shift in dispossessory logic in public health that reinforced the same racial boundaries as its predecessor, this time demarking a cordon thérapeutique premised upon mobilizing behavioural and epidemiological carceral logics against non-conforming “vulnerable” populations. Reaching its pinnacle in the institutionalization of the harm reduction ‘movement’, public health authorities since the 1990s have poured seemingly endless resources into Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside aimed at individualizing and medicalizing drug-related social risks, while conceding to new extremes of housing deterioration and the further corporate takeover and conversion of properties that have predictably pushed more and more people into heightened risk environments. By 2024, we argue that a new crisis is emerging from public health’s continued failure to respond to the twin housing and drug poisoning crises which has been compounded by post-pandemic politicization. This crisis has laid the groundwork for an even more virulent carceral logic, this time centered on public safety - one whose effect could be a cordon carcéral, backstopped by legislation to criminalize unhoused drug users and ‘involuntary treatment.’