Pursuing Human Techniques of Progressive Justice: The Ethical Assumptions of Early-to-Mid-Twentieth-Century English-Canadian Penal Reformers
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In all portions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, at least a little of the commentary in Canada concerning criminal justice discussed reforms that might in some way make for a more promising genre of penal activity in the colony or country.This dissertation allows us to probe reformist commentary from the first two thirds of the twentieth century, primarily discourse between 1920 and the mid-1950s regarding imprisonment and parole-related measures pertaining to adult men.Scholarship on nineteenth-or twentieth-century reformist penal activity, or on social reform more generally, has often identified ways in which such activity proved quite consonant with more conservative assumptions or outcomes than would sit well with present-day progressive readers.My dissertation, by contrast, numbers among the studies which associate penal reformers' outlook primarily with liberal or progressive perspectives.In this particular study, the liberal tenor of their mentality will register in our minds through an assessment of the ethical assumptions that reformers displayed, especially their assumptions concerning condemnation, exclusion, coercion, and compassion.Reformers' speeches, publications, and so forth allow us to highlight four "moral sources" due to which they thought their penal perspective qualified as compelling: Christianity, the notion of humanness, the meritoriousness of technique, and the idea of justice.Their commentary assigned priority to technique-related rhetoric, to statements that associated penal activity, including rehabilitative tactics, with instrumentalist plans through which "the protection" with which the citizenry was enamoured would materialize.Yet even though reformers' arguments savoured primarily iii of instrumentalist assumptions, neither justice nor compassion was wholly neglected in their discourse.In fact, reformers hit upon a defensible affirmation of quasicompassionate ideas thanks to instrumentalist rhetoric itself.iv
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 | 0.009 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.025 | 0.098 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".