Mark S. Hamm, The Spectacular Few: Prisoner Radicalization and the Evolving Terrorist Threat.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
8).M ark Hamm is an interesting academic character.He runs around with cultural criminologists.The goal of cultural criminology is to explore the meanings of rule-breaking activity for those who do it and those who are subject to it.The Spectacular Few is part of the Alternative Criminology Series of NYU Press, edited by cultural criminologist extraordinaire Jeff Ferrell.Hamm is also a former prison warden from Arizona.Both aspects of his approach to understanding criminal justice figure prominently in The Spectacular Few.This is not Hamm's first book on what he calls prisoner radicalization.The Spectacular Few consolidates Hamm's findings from longstanding research on organized racists and skinheads, the militant right in the US, and other groups he refers to as extremists and terrorists.Parallel to the well-known sociological contention that prisons are schools of crime, Hamm argues that religion in prison can create conditions that foster terrorist planning.However, Hamm's definitions of radicalization and terrorism are very slippery.The Spectacular Few begins with a history of what Hamm calls prisoner radicalization, with focus on Winston Churchill, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, and Adolf Hitler.It is not clear what radicalization means here with inclusion of Winston Churchill in the sample, and it is not clear why other names such as Fidel Castro are left off the list.Hamm argues that prisoner radicalization is a double-edged sword, with possible negative and positive outcomes.His point is that prison conditions make for concentrated exposure to particular ideologies, which can have an overwhelming effect on prisoners.Next, Hamm examines connections between the Nation of Islam in US prisons, the Black Panthers, and the popularity of figures such as Malcolm X.He details how Muslim prisoners organized to protect guards and prevent violence during the Attica Prison rebellion in 1971.He explores the emergence of the Aryan Brotherhood in prisons like Soledad, San Quentin, and Folsom.Conflict resulted in intense feuds between rival African American Muslim and white racist groups, having the unintended effect of altering the religious ideologies underpinning Kevin Walby is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminal Justice at University of Winnipeg.With Randy Lippert he is co-editor of Policing Cities: Urban Securitization and Regulation in a 21 st Century World (Routledge, 2013) and Corporate Security in the 21 st Century: Theory and Practice in International Perspective (Palgrave, 2014).With Justin Piché he is working on a SSHRCfunded study of prison museums and dark tourism sites across Canada.
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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) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.002 |
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".