Theorizing the Official Record of Inmate Ashley Smith: Necropolitics, Exclusions, and Multiple Agencies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article presents findings from a critical discourse analysis (CDA) of public texts, revealing how sense was made of Ashley Smith in the official record, where she was configured as a carceral subject: an inmate.Smith's is a case fundamentally like those of many inmates.This can be better understood if a new language is deployed for theorizing these recurring deaths.Smith's death can be read not as an isolated system failure, but as a necropolitical success.CDA of this official story reveals that the Smith case is an extreme result of everyday brutality.It is not anomalous, but rather a predictable and recurring result, of a society and bureaucracies' gradual necropolitical exclusions.Drawing on theorizations about logics of exclusion from Giorgio Agamben and Achille Mbembe, the article argues that forms of governance in power and knowledge that allow some people, and in particular certain women and girls, to be categorized as homo sacer, neither alive nor dead, were actively involved in Ashley Smith's death both before and after her transfer to CSC custody.These forms of governance remain in operation with widely felt consequences in prisons, not just in Canada, but across neoliberal societies, and not just in prisons, but also in those societies in general.I argue that, on this analysis, the death of Inmate Smith speaks to a need for broad-based and fundamental change to operating logic deployed in the operation of the criminal justice and * Rebecca Bromwich is a faculty member at Carleton's Department of Law and Legal Studies.She has an LL.M. and a Ph.D. specifically focused on youth criminal justice and children's law, and a Certificate from the Master Class at the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School.correctional systems, and in consequence, it is quite correct for reference to the Smith case to be situated in the Ministerial Mandate letter to Justice.
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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 | 0.014 | 0.018 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.027 | 0.123 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.023 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| 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".