Bibliographic record
Abstract
Prisoners can be tragically wronged by the prison system, as highlighted by the recent Ashley Smith case. Tort actions have proven to be a problematic form of recourse for them. Negligence claims made by prisoners face many obstacles at every stage of the analysis: the duty of care, standard and breach, and causation. The authors offer an overview of tort litigation coming out of Canadian prison with a focus on health care based negligence claims, risks arising from other prisoners and the risk of self-harm. They find that these cases are unevenly resolved when the plaintiff is a prisoner. The paper further considers “conditions of confinement” and attempts to determine whether this standard could give rise to a novel duty of care. The authors outline several impediments to the imposition of such a duty. They note that Canadian courts are reluctant to impose duties on public actors, particularly when the conduct in question walks the fine line between operational and policy-oriented action. Improving conditions of confinement would be an expensive undertaking and the imposition of a duty of care would involve costly funding decisions, so the authors determine that the courts would be unlikely to accept it as a legitimate duty of care. If tort litigation can be made more accessible to prisoners the end result may be the improved enforcement of their entitlements and the betterment of internal prison conditions.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.024 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".