Searching prison cells and prisoner bodies: Redacting carceral power and glimpsing gendered resistance in women’s prisons
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this article, I explore the routinized practices of prisoner discipline: searching bodies and cells in four Canadian federal women’s prisons. Through an analysis of post-search reports as well as reported incidents of use of force, I discuss three key findings: searching and confiscation patterns across institutions are not dictated by size of the inmate population or security level of the institution; the redaction of information by prison authorities is an increasing and pervasive tactic of penal governance legitimated through an inter-legality of privacy and security; and that the searching of prisoner bodies and cells suggests a highly discretionary use of searching authority across women’s federal prisons that produces a gendered organizational logic. The text of the reports implies how women prisoners continue to be censured for their errant behaviour through the confiscation of personal items deemed to be unauthorized. These data also illustrate the ways in which women prisoners seek to achieve agency and self-determination within limited means.
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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 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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".