Taking the Rap: Women Doing Time for Society's Crimes Ann Hansen. Toronto, ON.: Between the Lines (2018) 368pp. CAN$22.95pb ISBN 9781771133555
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Through the lens of Ann Hansen's experiences in multiple Canadian jails and prisons, which span nearly 30 years, readers are taken inside these institutions for a close-up view of the dynamics that permeate daily prison life. By weaving together personal stories and political context, Hansen presents three related themes throughout the book: the marginalisation and criminalisation of poor and minority groups, the dehumanisation and infantilisation of prisoners resulting from the nature of prison power dynamics, and the social and economic circumstances that perpetuate the cycle of victimisation and crime. A self-proclaimed anarchist, Hansen's political activism before her arrest included involvement with groups that worked for prison abolition, women's rights, Indigenous rights, and environmental causes. Hansen's activism and opposition to capitalism as an economic and political form of governance are highlighted throughout the book, and readers are invited to see events through this frame of reference. Yet one need not adopt these perspectives to find this book useful in gaining a deeper understanding of the social, political, and economic forces that drive events both within, and outside, the prison walls. Hansen's involvement with the group Direct Action, and its activities, comprises much of Part One of the book. Hansen, along with four of her confederates, dubbed the ‘Squamish Five’ by the media, were arrested on 20 January 1983 for their involvement in the bombing of the Litton Systems Canada, a manufacturing site for cruise missiles in Ontario. In 1984, Hansen was sentenced to life in prison for her involvement in: the Litton bombing; a bombing of the Cheekeye-Dunsmuir plant, part of a hydroelectric project on Vancouver Island; and bombing of three Red Hot Video Stores, a chain that sold adult videos. The remainder of Part One of the book comprises the criminal trial and Hansen's early days in confinement at the Prison for Women (P4W) in Kingston, Ontario. Parts Two and Three cover Hansen's time in various women's institutions, her eventual release in 1991, and her eventual return to prison for about two months in 2006. Part Four details Hansen's brief stay at Quinte Detention Center, a provincial prison in Napanee, Ontario, a few days at the Central East Correctional Centre located in Lindsay, Ontario, and finally a stint at the Grand Valley Institution for Women (GVI). Part Five covers the period of Hansen's release in 2006 through her reincarceration in 2012 at GVI. Part Six covers the changes that had taken place at Grand Valley between 2006 and 2012, and the ongoing expansion of the prison system via new and existing prison facilities throughout Canada during that time. Although the book is written as a memoir, it is infused throughout with glimpses into the broader social and economic forces that were shaping the growth of prisons and incarceration rates of women throughout North America over the past two decades. Yet, it is the personal stories of the women with whom Hansen was incarcerated that highlight the disproportionate effects on minorities, the uneducated, the drug-addicted, and the poor of various law and order policies. Hansen has taken on a difficult task in attempting to weave together her own experience in penal institutions, the experiences of other women, and the political and economic forces that have contributed to the rapid expansion of prisons in North America. To a certain extent, some of the impact is lost in the statistics, and the later parts of the book become a bit bogged down and repetitive with numbers. Nevertheless, the parts where this book is at its best is when Hansen steps outside the role of spectator and political activist and relates the daily struggles and deprivations that the women in prisons endure before, during, and after their time in incarceration.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".