Bibliographic record
Abstract
The “pains of imprisonment” is one of the most prominent concepts in the social study of incarceration. First introduced by Gresham Sykes in 1958, it has subsequently been taken up by generations of authors and applied to an increasingly diverse range of contexts, populations, and activities. This article details how the “pains of imprisonment” concept has evolved and expanded. It is based on an analysis of 50 academic works (books, articles, and chapters) that used some variation of the “pains of…” formulation. We identified four main trajectories in the literature that have contributed to this expansion, which we document in the first section through the use of illustrative examples. This is followed by a more critical series of reflections that seek to appreciate some of the organizational and political factors that might account for the appeal of this concept. Finally, we conclude by questioning whether the “pains” framing might paradoxically be a victim of its own success, with its analytical and political purchase potentially blunted through overuse and overextension.
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.
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 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.056 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".