Making Meaning out of Punishment: Penitentiary, Prison, Jail, and Lock-up Museums in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
While much of the penal tourism literature focuses on historically significant and infamous penitentiary, prison, and jail museums, such as Alcatraz and Eastern State Penitentiary in the United States, there exist many smaller, rural sites, including decommissioned local jails and lock-ups, where confinement and punishment are represented. Based on a 5-year qualitative study, this article examines the scope of large and small penal history museums across Canada. Offering a typology to aid criminologists and criminal justice scholars in understanding cultural sites that shape public meanings of imprisonment and punishment, we contribute to the penal tourism and dark tourism literatures by analysing museum displays. We make comparisons with national meanings found in studies concerning penal history museums across Australia, South Africa, and the United States and reflect upon the factors animating the emergence of these sites in Canada. We conclude with a discussion on the significance of our findings for criminological and penal tourism literatures.
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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) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.025 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".