The Floating Signifier of “Radicalization”: Correctional Officers’ Perceptions of Prison Radicalization
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The number of people incarcerated for extremist actions has grown over the past decades. The resulting prospect of prison radicalization has contributed to widespread risk responsibilitization among prison staff. Low-level correctional officers now perceive themselves as being directly responsible for detecting radicalization on their units. Consequently, radicalization has become a meaningful topic for prison staff, one which shapes their daily actions and perceptions. However, officers’ understandings of radicalization may not conform with accepted definitions. Through 131 semistructured interviews with Canadian correctional officers, we demonstrate how radicalization functions as a floating signifier in prison, influencing officer thought and behavior in meaningful ways while eluding easy definition. Officers redefine radicalization to fit interpretive frames around religion and race, gang membership, and mental health, irrespective of whether stereotypical extremists exist in a given prison. We demonstrate how radicalization, when operating as a floating signifier, can significantly influence officers’ perceptions and front-line prison operations.
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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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.001 |
| 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 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".