“Knuckle-Dragging Thugs”: Civilizing processes and the biosocial revolution in the National Hockey League
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this article, we advocate for the development of a critical criminology of sport. To this end, we analyze news media coverage of a sample of National Hockey League suspensions to explore how the sporting world disseminates cultural messages about crime and punishment. Our analysis reveals that athlete “offenders” are likened to Lombrosian evolutionary throwbacks whose brutal on-ice violence recalls a less civilized past. Images of blood spilled on the ice and bodies carried away on stretchers shock our sensibilities. We argue that, as the arbiter of supplemental discipline, the National Hockey League regulates the bodies under its control and aims to signify that hockey and its fans are encapsulated in what Elias famously calls civilizing processes rather than mere barbaric sporting games. We situate these findings in the reemergence of a bio(social) criminology and express concerns regarding the spread of this rhetoric.
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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 | 0.002 |
| 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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".