Pain in Vain: Penal Abolition and the Legacy of Louk Hulsman. Edited by Justin Piché (J. Piché and J. Hulsman Trans.). (Red Quill Books, Ottawa, 2023, 290pp. £26.99 pb)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
On occasion, an author provides a key which unlocks their intellectual project to the reader. In the final paragraph of Peines perdues: le système pénal en question, Louk Hulsman reflects on his work with a simple horticultural metaphor, ‘[i]f, in my garden, I exclude the obstacles which prevent the sun and the water from fertilising the earth, plants will rise which I didn’t even suspect existed’ (p. 145). He then suggests that the disappearance of the State’s punitive system makes possible the opportunities for a new justice. Pain in Vain has two parts: a translation of Peines perdues, first published in French in 1982, drawing on lively interviews with Jacqueline Bernat de Celis, and an edited collection of contemporary essays on Hulsman’s legacy. Split in two, Part I consists of the interviews and a series of 60 short reflections offering further clarification of his thought. Bernat de Celis’ introduction points to Hulsman’s enigmatic qualities; a Professor of Criminal Law for 18 years questioning the very foundations of his career (p. 23). Discussing early formative experiences, Hulsman described his difficult experiences at a Franciscan boarding school and then being sent to a concentration camp while living under German occupation. At one point, Bernat de Celis presses him for a precise moment when he embraces abolition. He describes his conversion as a process where the ‘necessity of abolitionism gradually became a part of me’ (p. 36) informed by the deep realization that the penal system never works according to the principles that are offered to justify its enduring legitimacy.
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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) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 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".