Cutting Knowledge: The Pathologization of Self-Injury in Correctional Discourse
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis critically examines correctional discourse on prisoner self-injury produced by the Correctional Service of Canada's (CSC) Research Branch (RB) between 1990 and 2012.Since 2010, the RB has published over 700 pages worth of research on prisoner selfinjury.This new wave of research is identified in this thesis as a significant growth in correctional knowledge on self-injury.Self-injury in correctional environments has been a topic of much debate in recent years, where academics and governments alike have assessed the ability of the prison to adequately manage and treat self-injuring prisoners.Stepping back from these debates of the punitive versus therapeutic capabilities of the prison (Hannah-Moffat, 2001;Kendall, 1994;Kilty, 2006 Kilty, , 2008b)), this thesis examines what knowledges on prisoner self-injury are produced in correctional discourse and how these knowledges both enable and constrain understandings of self-injury in the prisoner population.Through a discourse analysis, this thesis identifies the discursive shifts in correctional knowledges on self-injury.Grounded in the extant clinical and correctional discourse that has historically constructed self-injury as practiced by manipulative, violent or suicidal prisoners, the new surge of research demonstrates a shift to predominately pathological explanations that aim to reduce the deviant behaviour to the manifestation of a mental illness.This domination of the 'psy-sciences' as 'intellectual technologies' (Rose, 1990(Rose, , 1996b) ) in turn both demotes and bars sociological or otherwise non-psy understandings of self-injury.It is suggested that political accountabilities further shape the output of research.This is demonstrated in how the characterization of prisoners as pathologically inclined to self-injure lends to the CSC's displacement of responsibility for self-injury from the prison to prisoners' mental illness.I suggest that women prisoners are increasingly pathologized for their self-injurious behaviours in relation to men when the historical medicalization of women's madness (Ussher, 1991(Ussher, , 2011) ) is considered.This thesis contributes to critical debates on whether quantitative versus qualitative methods should be problematized as contributing to the production of knowledge.It is argued that it is not the research methodology that should be problematized, but rather the ideological platform from which the discourse originates.It is suggested that regardless of methodological approach, the RB's conceptualization of prisoners who engage in selfinjury was pre-determined by their ideological alignment with the psy-sciences.The implications of the recent shift in correctional discourse with respect to the responsibilization of prisoners for their mental illness(es) are also explored.
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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 | 0.009 | 0.030 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.055 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.014 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| 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 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".