An Institutional Suicide Machine: Discrimination Against Federally Sentenced Aboriginal Women in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
On October 19, 2007, Ashley Smith, a nineteen-year-old Aboriginal woman from Moncton, New Brunswick, was found dead in her segregation cell at the Grand Valley Institution, a federal woman’s prison in Kitchener, Ontario. Smith spent the majority of her life in federal institutions across Canada, effectively cutting her off from her family and her community. During her incarceration, a prison guard was charged with assaulting Ms. Smith, she was forcibly strapped to a confinement chair, and she had her clothing taken away on multiple occasions, leaving her naked and cold. At the time of her death, Ashley Smith was isolated in segregation, with only an oversized security gown to wear and no mattress in her cell, forcing her to sleep on the concrete floor without a blanket. The treatment she experienced while in the custody of the Correctional Service of Canada (CSC) was inhumane. It was also illegal. This paper situates discriminatory treatment against federally sentenced Aboriginal women in Canada in the international legal context, arguing that the CSC’s treatment of Ms. Smith, and countless other Aboriginal women in federal prisons, amounts to an infringement of Canada’s obligations under the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), and is therefore a violation of public international law. Despite numerous studies, inquiries, task force recommendations, and a domestic human rights complaint and resulting investigation into the treatment of Aboriginal women in custody, Canada (as represented by CSC) is failing to live up to its international legal commitments by continuing to mistreat federally sentenced Aboriginal women with relative impunity. The present inquiry draws upon existing research and factual reports to reveal the sexist, racist and neocolonial nature of the discrimination experienced by federally sentenced Aboriginal women and considers the possibility of employing CEDAW as a tool to draw international attention to discrimination against federally sentenced Aboriginal women in Canada.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".