‘Docile bodies shuffling in unison’: The Prisoner as Worker in Canadian Prison Writing
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.
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 | 0.004 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.046 | 0.029 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".