Keeping Kids Safe in Custody: Youths’ Perception of Safety While Incarcerated in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Keeping Kids Safe (KKS) is a study that presents an integrated model to demonstrate that the interaction between the predisposition of the youth and the institutional environment acts to promote or deter safety among incarcerated youth. The study illustrates that the peer subculture that produces a spectrum of violence within the institution is dependent on both the extra-custody attributes of the youth that affect his attitudes, beliefs and behaviours and on the critical influence of institutional attributes like program resources, staff/youth interactions and practices of social control. A predisposition that includes child maltreatment and exposure to domestic violence was used as the clarifying example that brought the model to life. Coping strategies used by youth to ameliorate or manage peer aggression in the institutions were examined.\nThe KKS study utilized a mixed methods triangulation design and through self reports by youth consumers of service, offers valuable insight into the lived experience of youth who were residing in four secure custody facilities in Canada. Two sets of sites were designated Safer and Less Safe based on institutional safety as perceived by the youth. A variation in culture across the two institutional types was evidenced through the description of peer harassment and aggression and the concomitant coping strategies used by youth to manage the milieu. Further analysis of the data according to the youth's involvement in the child welfare and youth justice systems was undertaken.\nKey findings that emerged from this study were: The imported risk factors of an adverse family history of child maltreatment and exposure to domestic violence, combined with an early and protracted history of incarceration in the youth justice system set the stage for a continuum of peer aggression within the youth justice institutions studied. This finding confirms the integrated model for understanding violence among incarcerated youth. Furthermore, coping strategies which served to ameliorate or manage the impact of peer aggression were directly aligned with the adaptive responses of youth who struggle with a history of child maltreatment or exposure to domestic violence. Youth imported these entrenched response patterns of internalizing symptomology, externalizing behaviours and relational difficulties into the institutional milieu. Nonetheless, the protective features of the institutional environment and the role played by staff served to mediate the prevalence and impact of peer aggression.\nYouth participants reinforced that violence begins in the family and without appropriate recognition and intervention can be perpetuated in societal institutions. Accordingly, recommendations for research, policy and practice are offered.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".