The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same: The Obdurate Nature of Pandemic Bail Practices
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In an unprecedented move, the criminal courts in Ontario closed on March 20th, 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Bail appearances, however, could not be suspended, resulting in the rapid move to virtual appearances. Despite the dramatic change in the modality of court appearances, remarkably little changed in how the bail court operated or processed bail matters. Observations from 80 days of virtual bail court reveal the obdurate nature of well know issues with the bail process, including the culture of adjournment, reliance on surety supervision, and numerous conditions of release. Problematically, the courts are closed to the public and the accused are rendered invisible in the virtual space, leaving them even more dependent on counsel and the court. Differences in access to technology and private space create additional barriers for the most marginalized. Consistent with Feeley’s assessment that ‘the process is the punishment,’ the virtual model has layered new punitive elements onto an already punishing experience.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.037 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| 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".