The “problem” of health: An analysis of health care provision in Canada’s federal prisons
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The United Nations states that prisoners should enjoy the same standards of health care that are available in the community. Despite this, persons in prison experience barriers to care and face unique health challenges. Given the ways in which prisons shape health outcomes for incarcerated persons, it is important to interrogate how the provision of health care is governed in custodial settings. In this article, we examine one important aspect of governance: legislation governing the provision of health care in prisons. We view this issue through a critical lens, building on a body of poststructural scholarship which has illuminated how laws and policies are not merely tools of governance but also key sites for the production of meanings around social “problems,” including the “problem of health.” Taking Canada’s Corrections and Conditional Release Act as a case example and applying Carol Bacchi’s “What’s the Problem Represented to Be” analytical framework, we examine how the specific representation of “health” in this legislation works to produce effects for persons in federal prison. Three key themes are formed through this analysis. First, what constitutes “essential services” in the context of federal prisons is more limited compared with the broader community. Second, the dichotomy between the rights of persons in prison versus the protection of society that is produced in development of these laws has significant bearing on the treatment of those in prison. Third, this representation has negative effects on the health of persons in prison. In order to meet United Nations standards, greater attention must be paid to the ways in which laws and other governing practices reproduce inequities in health care provision in prisons.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.024 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| 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".