The death of Ashley Smith: Between the biopolitics of imprisonment and judicial sovereignty
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
This essay offers a critical rhetorical reading of the death of Ashley Smith, a young woman who died of positional asphyxia when she tied a ligature around her neck while being held in solitary confinement. Smith’s death was ruled a homicide by the jury in the coroner’s inquest and subsequently figured as a suicide in the Correctional Service of Canada’s published response to the inquest one year later. The equivocation over the precise cause of her death raises questions over the agency—or agencies—that were responsible for her death, whether directly or through systemic negligence. Drawing on Foucault’s theoretical and historical distinction between sovereign power and biopolitics, the authors argue that Smith’s death is a biopolitical effect of neoliberal correctional institutions. There is a ruse, however, in the way in which the Correctional Service of Canada has evaded responsibility: by invoking a sovereign legal prerogative over the lives placed in its care in an effort to conceal its biopolitical involvement.
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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it