‘Docile bodies shuffling in unison’: The Prisoner as Worker in Canadian Prison Writing
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Focusing on recent life writing by Canadian prisoners, this article explores the relatively unexamined representation of the prisoner as worker. Drawing together prison memoirs as well as works published in prison serials, anthologies, and volumes of poetry, it examines incarcerated authors’ depictions of prison labour. In their emphasis on the alienating, numbing effects of such work, these texts present a counter-narrative to the vision more commonly promoted by the state — and by liberal society generally — of the rehabilitative value of prison labour. This body of literature provides a direct counterpoint to the way in which CORCAN, the federal agency that employs prisoners, represents the value of prison work. The writings not only serve as counter-narratives to the state's representation of prison labour, but they also desire to be read as statements about the world beyond the prison. The prison, these authors insist, provides a unique vantage point from which to critique the capitalist economy controlling the lives of people both inside and outside the prison.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 it