The Use of Incarceration in Canada: A Test of Political and Social Threat Explanations on the Variation in Prison Admissions across Canadian Provinces, 2001–2010
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Recent scholarship has indicated that political and ethnic threat theories—which maintain that the use of prison is not only determined by the extent of crime in society but also by various features related to power, ideology, and access to resources—provide powerful accounts as to why the use of punishment varies within and between societies. However, no study to date has tested these theories within Canada, a country in which such theories are quite plausible. This study begins to fill this void by assessing these theoretical claims using a pooled time series analysis of the variation in imprisonment rates across Canadian provinces from the years 2001 to 2010. After accounting for several measures including charge rates, the results show that Canadian incarceration rates are largely driven by ethnic threat. The size of the Aboriginal and visible minority populations across each province are the most significant determinants of the variation in punishment. Furthermore, we find a nonlinear relationship consistent with a political version of the threat hypothesis. Results, however, do not support political accounts which stress the power of right‐wing parties or a conservative public.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".