From badness to madness : penal and medical knowledge in federal women's prison policy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Canada's federal prison system, Correctional Service Canada (CSC), has made vast changes to the policies and structure of women's prisons over the past twenty years, claiming to have ushered in a 'new era' of "woman-centered," "culturally-sensitive," and "empowering" penology for women. Throughout this emergent policy development, the "psy-sciences" increasingly playa significant role, greatly influencing both the structure and operation of women's federal prisons and mental health services therein. This research seeks to explore CSC's women's prisons by using an institutional ethnographic strategy, textual analysis, as defined by Dorothy Smith and others. The central analysis concerns the ways in which discourse and ideology inform institutional and medical 'knowledge', and subsequently structure women's federal prisons and mental health services therein, illuminating the ways in which institutional texts regulate and facilitate policy to serve the ideological goals of the institution. The most salient and significant CSC policy texts published in the last twenty years were selected for analysis, and expressions of penal and medical "knowledges" were "mapped" to explicate the social and ruling relations that underlie CSC policy. Three primary rhetorical themes were identified in the texts: "Woman-centeredness/cultural sensitivity," "choice," and "correction/healing." These penal "knowledges" were examined and contrasted with CSC praxis. It is argued that CSC policy more accurately espouses neo-liberal ideology which reproduces sexism, racism, and the pathologization of women prisoners. It is concluded that CSC's purported achievement of a feminist and non-racist penal paradigm is more rhetorical than practical, as CSC continues to neglect social explanations for women's criminality and mental health status by individualizing women's problems and holding them personally responsible for their own criminal and mental "correction."
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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".