Multiculturalism Under Confinement: Prisoner Race Relations Inside Western Canadian Prisons
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
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.
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.
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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
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 it