A Re-education on How to Work: Vocational Programs in Kingston-Area Prisons, 1950–1965
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Prison for Women, Kingston Penitentiary, and Collins Bay Penitentiary each offered an increasing variety of vocational training opportunities to incarcerated people in the mid-20th century. This article examines vocational training in these Kingston-area prisons from 1950 to the mid-1960s and argues that access to these programs was based largely on gender and age. Foucault’s idea of governmentality supports analysis of how the Penitentiary Service of Canada, reformers, and prisoners understood the process of learning how to work. Women incarcerated at the Prison for Women were trained in fields that mirrored domestic labour, and limited numbers of younger women were given access to trial vocational training in women-dominated fields such as hairdressing. Young men in their teens and twenties incarcerated at Collins Bay Penitentiary were given access to skilled trades, while older men at Kingston Penitentiary could try to qualify for transfer to Collins Bay Penitentiary by taking basic educational course upgrades. These vocational programs were supported by the John Howard Society of Ontario and the Elizabeth Fry Society of Kingston, local prisoner aid societies that helped formerly incarcerated people find jobs and coordinated with prison administration to bolster rehabilitation programs.
 La Prison des femmes, le Pénitencier de Kingston et le Pénitencier de Collins Bay offraient chacun une variété croissante de possibilités de formation professionnelle aux personnes incarcérées au milieu du 20e siècle. Cet article examine la formation professionnelle dans ces prisons dans la région de Kingston de 1950 au milieu des années 1960 et soutient que l’accès à ces programmes était largement basé sur le sexe et l’âge. L’idée de gouvernementalité de Foucault soutient l’analyse de la façon dont le Service des Pénitenciers du Canada, les réformateurs et les prisonniers ont compris le processus d’apprentissage du travail. Les femmes incarcérées à la Prison des femmes ont été formées dans des domaines qui reflétaient le travail domestique, et un nombre limité de jeunes femmes ont eu accès à une formation professionnelle à l’essai dans des domaines à prédominance féminine comme la coiffure. Les jeunes hommes dans l’adolescence et la vingtaine incarcérés au Pénitencier de Collins Bay ont eu accès à des métiers spécialisés, tandis que les hommes plus âgés du Pénitencier de Kingston pouvaient essayer de se qualifier pour être transférés au Pénitencier de Collins Bay en suivant des cours de formation de base. Ces programmes professionnels ont été soutenus par la Société John Howard de l’Ontario et la Société Elizabeth Fry de Kingston, des sociétés locales d’aide aux prisonniers qui ont aidé les anciens incarcérés à trouver un emploi et ont cordonné avec l’administration pénitentiaire pour renforcer les programmes de réadaptation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 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) | 0.001 | 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 teacher head, 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".