Determining the Punishment of Sex Criminals in Confederation-Era Canada: A Matter of National Policy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Criminal justice was a critical component of nation building, which culminated in Canada’s adoption of a federal Criminal Code in 1892. However, the connections between criminal law reform and the Dominion’s fortunes began in 1869, when penal policy was first formulated and debated on a national stage. At that point, the mandatory sentence of death applied to rape and carnal knowledge of a girl under ten years of age. This article analyzes why and how Canada’s early harsh stance, promoted by John A. Macdonald, gave way, within a decade, to milder penalties. It argues that existing explanations, which focus on the “civilization” of punishment and the racist character of penal policy, must be augmented by an analysis of regional tensions, clashes between the judiciary and the legislature, and the factors at play in individual capital cases (twenty-six in total, from 1867–77). Executive discretion, while constitutional, ultimately proved to be a liability in the broader project of nation building.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| 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".