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 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 | 0.000 |
| 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 | 0.001 |
| 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 teacher head, 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".