The Ottawa Special Services Project: A Case Study in Destabilization
Bibliographic record
Abstract
I think they killed it largely because of a philosophical bent among benchers who still view the defense of criminals who can't afford to pay a lawyer as a quasi-charity. A vast majority of them have never done a criminal case and never will. - An Ottawa defense attorney (in Bindman, 1984) IN 1982, THE LAW SOCIETY OF UPPER CANADA AUTHORIZED A PILOT PROJECT ON sentencing, the Ottawa Special Services Project. The program ran until early 1984, when it was discontinued by the Benchers of Convocation, the Law Society's Board of Directors. What follows is a case study of that program (Berg, 1998; Hamel, 1993). I have labeled this activity destabilization, reflecting activity on the part of governing bodies that is manifestly political and ideological in origin and designed to maintain established hegemony (Lee, 1994; Kofie, 1996). The thesis of this article is that the Ottawa Special Services project was, in fact, destabilized. The question is why: What societal forces contributed to the project's demise? In this regard, critical theory (Morrow, 1994; Groves and Frank, 1986; Russell, 1994) is particularly useful in deconstructing a legal aid project to see how the debate was defined and in demonstrating which ideologies served to reproduce hegemonic institutions. Critical theory further permits us to explore the general inequality of legal services to the poor, especially those people accused of criminal acts (Reiman, 1998). Thus, on a macro level, this case study takes place in the political economy of advanced, industrial capitalism in which inequality is structural (Gordon, 1971). Lastly, it will be importa nt to make practical observations about how society might respond to such scenarios (DeKeseredy and Schwartz, 1991). Origins The Attorney General of Ontario, the Honorable R. Roy McMurtry, originated the project because of his interest in creating a public defender office in the province. This posed a direct challenge to the existing system of legal aid certificates assigned -- on a case-by-case basis -- to private members of the Bar (Levy, 1991a). Discussions led to a compromise under which the existing delivery system of indigent legal services could be preserved at reduced cost and with improved defense services. From this agenda, the Law Society was directed to investigate a defense worker model then being touted by the National Legal Aid and Defender Association, headquartered in Chicago (Edwards, 1976-1977). To pursue this and other projects, the Law Society hired a recent graduate from York University's Osgoode Hall, Harold J. Levy. A young, liberal attorney with extensive credentials in journalism, Levy hired consultants to conduct a survey of legal aid services in Ontario (mainly in Toronto), and to help formulate a model pilot program. The firm hired by Levy to interview attorneys, members of the judiciary, and representatives of criminal justice agencies found that these professionals overwhelmingly endorsed the need for to help prepare social history reports and investigate sentencing alternatives. Indeed, 50% of the lawyers told the interviewers that they had used social workers in private criminal cases, and 43% had used them in legal aid cases. However, a random check of Legal Aid files did not reveal any authorization for the use of social workers in criminal cases (Levy, 1980: 2, 4). It later became evident that Legal Aid attorneys were not using a formal advocacy model that employed social workers to prepare detailed sentencing evaluations. Instead, they relied on organizations such as the John Howard Association and the Elizabeth Fry Society to provide ad hoc services -- usually in the form of a community resource placement (such as counseling and helping find jobs and housing). Indeed, Legal Aid attorneys inundated the executive director of Toronto's John Howard Society with service requests and he wished to charge the Law Society a fee-for-service. …
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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 | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.055 | 0.029 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.012 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| 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".