Multiculturalism Under Confinement: Prisoner Race Relations Inside Western Canadian Prisons
Bibliographic record
Abstract
What do race relations among Canadian prisoners tell us about national mythology, liberal multiculturalism, and racial colour-blindness? Drawing from almost 500 semi-structured interviews conducted with male prisoners inside four provincial institutions in Western Canada as part of the University of Alberta Prison Project, we analyse prisoners’ perceptions of race and detail how their beliefs in Canada’s national mythology – particularly multiculturalism – foster racial colour-blindness in daily prison life. Our data speak to both support for, and critiques of, liberal multiculturalism as a lived political philosophy. For instance, racial colour-blindness helps reduce ethnic conflict and encourages inter-group relations among racially diverse prisoners. As critics of liberal multiculturalism suggest, however, our participants individualized racism, focusing on what is often called ‘overt racism’ (such as white supremacy). Few participants acknowledged ‘structural racism’ or dwelled on the overrepresentation of people of colour in the prison system (even when housed on a unit that could contain over 60 per cent Indigenous prisoners). Some prisoners expressed a belief that Canada had overcome racism.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.037 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".