PAW-sitive for Whom? Examining the Treatment Acceptability of Prison-Animal Programs
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
Although prison-based animal programs (PAPs) are not routinely available in rehabilitation plans at correctional facilities, they may represent a viable treatment option given the growing evidence showing that interacting with animals develops vocational skills, decreases behavioral infractions, and fosters social skills and psychological wellbeing for prisoners. However, little is known about the general public’s attitudes towards PAPs, especially in relation to other treatment options. Understanding attitudes towards PAPs is relevant because these programs often depend on donations, coordination with non-profit agencies, and adoption fees from animal shelters to operate. This study examines whether individuals consider PAPs an acceptable treatment option for prisoners, and whether those decisions are influenced by prisoner characteristics. Using survey methodology with convenience sampling, 250 participants read vignettes that manipulated the characteristics of the prisoner by gender (male or female), ethnicity (Caucasian, African American, Indigenous/Native American), and crime (misdemeanor, murder, or sexual assault), and then evaluated the treatment acceptability of four treatment options (dog visitation, dog training and vocational programs, psychological counseling, or no treatment). While participants rated counseling most acceptable and no treatment least acceptable, opinions about PAPs varied. We found a gender × crime interaction, whereby participants rated PAPs more acceptable for prisoners who committed minor crimes, especially if they were female. We also found an ethnicity × crime interaction, whereby participants rated PAPs more acceptable for prisoners who committed minor crimes, especially if Indigenous or Caucasian. Our results highlight the presence of implicit bias in participant’s ratings of treatment acceptability. We discuss implications for rehabilitation programs.
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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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