Prisons that Empower. Neo-liberal Governance in Canadian Women's Prisons
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper uses recent policy changes in Canadian women's imprisonment to examine the emergence of neo-liberal strategies of penal governing. The first section critically assesses the claim that new strategies of crime control involve a reconfiguration of the responsibilities of state and civil society. In the second section, the logic and interpretive politics of empowerment strategies are evaluated. An emphasis is placed on how 'empowerment', a term previously associated with radical activists and social movements, is now as easily used by the Correctional Service of Canada to legitimate and justify the construction of a regime at five new regional prisons for women. This article reflexively examines the feminist and Aboriginal knowledges that contributed to the construction of empowerment as a legitimate and viable penal reform strategy; and it shows how feminist and Aboriginal reformers' notions of empowerment can be aligned with very different political rationalities and used as a strategy of responsibilization by policy makers and correctional officials. In particular, it shows how these knowledges get linked to penal power and used to create a new regime of governing and reinforce pre-existing relations of power. Finally, a discussion of the reassertion of sovereign and disciplinary power, when it comes to governing those who fail to take responsibility for their own empowerment is provided to show how neo-liberal strategies of government develop alongside, and operate in conjunction with, other forms of power.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.021 | 0.028 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| 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".