Unthinkable, Thinkable, and Back Again: The Use of Incarceration in Ontario during the COVID-19 Pandemic
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The arrival of COVID-19 added potentially deadly consequences to incarceration. In response, jurisprudence developed allowing for some to be spared the deprivation of their liberty. However, there is insufficient empirical evidence that this avoidance of incarceration occurred in practice in Ontario. Using fieldwork methods conducted in Ontario criminal courts coupled with data from Statistics Canada, we investigate if a change in the use of incarceration during the COVID-19 pandemic occurred, and if friction emerged between those who may and may not espouse this new outlook. We find a notable and persistent decrease in the use of incarceration, that this was welcomed by many court actors but also that a fatigue with such leniency grew among others. We discuss what this fatigue might signify for the potential longevity of this more exceptional use of incarceration and more largely what this can signify about changes in Canada’s criminal justice system.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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".