Incarcerated Workers’ Self-Organizing Contributes to Abolition Movements against Global Apartheid
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Incarcerated workers across Canadian prisons have organized and conducted strike actions. These actions, however, have been rejected by the Canadian state, on the basis that the incarcerated workers are not legally employees. The court ruling ( Guérin et al. v. Canada 2018), while accepting evidence of the prisoners’ material hardships from their low pay and from reprisals for striking, excluded them from the legal protections of employees and thus devalued the prisoners’ labour. The self-organizing efforts reveal the levels of inequality experienced by incarcerated workers in the ruling order of global apartheid, “in which race and mobility feature as primary variables for which heightened security and militarization are the answer” ( Besteman 2020 , 1). This article discusses the effects of prisoners’ organizing in the larger context of social justice. In so doing it examines cultural texts that document interactions between organizers inside and outside prisons and their contribution toward alternatives to carceral cultures. This article argues that the cultural production by prisoners and their supporters express the conditions in which prisoner self-organizing is necessary for larger social transformation. The creation and nurturing of collective relationships with one another, both within and across prison walls, clarify common grounds for liberation struggles, and connect envisioned freedoms to overthrow the various forces that enclose communities and hold significant numbers of us captive.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.027 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".