Bibliographic record
Abstract
W estern prisons have been, and continue to be, described in various terms and using a broad range of images, each description relying on the interpretation of the individual, whether prisoner, guard, visitor, academic, or other interested party.It will come as no surprise, then, that the various descriptions, many self-serving, often confl ict and even contradict each other.M. C. Escher's famous lithograph, Ascending and Descending, serves as a metaphor for this inconsistency, with some of the fi gures going up the staircase as others descend, all of them retracing the same path in perpetual lockstep.When applied to Western prisons, this dual nature frequently fi nds its expression in the public face of the administrators and staff (safety and security) versus the private face (neglect and brutality).This issue of the Journal of Prisoners on Prisons (JPP) therefore offers an examination of the prison experience, given voice by those who have endured it, framed in terms Escher would doubtless understand and appreciate.Colin Scholl opens the discussion with a personal narrative of what an American prison is like, in response to frequently asked questions by those on the outside.Scholl's stark recitation reveals its brutal nature.He shows us the life that many prisoners have known and to which they can relate.For at least twenty years, his life is totally controlled, from the time he gets up until the time he goes to bed, and he brings the reader into his struggle against the regimented routine and the constant refrain that he is worthless.An Australian prisoner, Craig Minogue, recounts his adventure in the absurd world of prison by detailing the bureaucratic obstacles encountered when attempting to get clear plastic covers for his books, which on the face of it is a reasonable request.The incoherent staff responses and the bureaucratic bungling make this simple request resemble a private in the military requesting nuclear launch codes from his commander in chief.The surreal aspect of the account is that Craig Minogue encountered the prison administration's ire after he successfully mounted a campaign to reduce drug abuse by prisoners.His narrative thus parallels Escher's creations perhaps more faithfully than many outsiders would believe, but his is no optical illusion.
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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 | 0.019 | 0.026 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.030 | 0.086 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.029 | 0.028 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.018 |
| Research integrity | 0.009 | 0.012 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
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".