The Reformatories and Industrial Schools
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Background Some of the children who were sent to Canada came from the British reformatories and industrial schools. This was always a sensitive issue since Canadian legislation debarred the entry of anyone with a criminal record, and public opinion could easily be inflamed by the claim that this prohibition had been evaded. In fact, it was only those who had been committed to a reformatory who were specifically precluded from entering the country, but even then there was the disputed question of whether an exception could be made in the case of those who had been fully discharged rather than released on licence. The position of the industrial school children was more ill-defined and less well understood. What was the distinction between these two groups? Although before the 1850s there had been a number of schemes for the institutional reform and training of young offenders, or for those on the threshold of delinquency, it was the 1854 Reformatory Schools Act, followed three years later by the Industrial Schools Act (and in 1866 by a combined Act) that heralded their rapid expansion. The first piece of legislation enabled courts to send children under the age of 16 (a minimum age of 10 was subsequently introduced) to a reformatory, but only after the expiry of a prison sentence. Such children could be kept in the institutions for between two and five years or until they reached the age of 18 (and later 19). The second Act gave courts the authority to order that children up to the age of 14 be sent to an industrial school and retained there until they were 15 (later 16). The grounds on which such an order could be made were extensive, and further additions were made from time to time. One aim was to combat child vagrancy and begging, but those who were found wandering and destitute, or who were known to frequent the company of thieves, for example, could also be dealt with in this way. So too could those under 14 who were charged by their parents with being beyond their control.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.026 | 0.002 |
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".