Transforming Canadian Criminal Justice: A Review of Indictment: The Criminal Justice System on Trial, Benjamin Perrin (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2023)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The injustices within the criminal justice system have led to countless publications.Scholars have filled libraries and spilled much ink to express dissatisfaction with criminal law.They will probably persist in doing so, as the criminal justice system is an institution that continues to structure our society.People like me might never face the criminal justice system.As a legal scholar, I analyze it, I teach it, and I criticize it, but I have not experienced it to its full depth.Therefore, the words of Benjamin Perrin, author of Indictment: The Criminal Justice System on Trial, struck a chord. 1 Like him, I have never had a negative experience with the police, and yet I have studied police violence for several years.Like him, I desperately need to shift my gaze away from academic discussions that too often exclude narratives of people in direct contact with the justice system.Perrin's book -based on personal accounts and scholarly analyses -follows the example of seminal works like Putting Trials on Trial, and will surely become a significant contribution to the socio-legal literature in Canada. 2 I. THE PROMISEThe first chapter sets the tone of the book.Perrin explains how the words of Harold Johnson -who is obviously a strong influence -resonated with him.Johnson called for the need to engage meaningfully with Indigenous peoples when discussing Indigenous matters.Put simply, people who are impacted by a decision should always take part in the decision-making process.Similarly, when discussing any issue, we should ensure that the people concerned have a seat at the table.Perrin bases his work on this famous "nothing on us without us" principle.3 He investigates the criminal justice system through the eyes of people who have experienced it: a breath of fresh air in legal scholarship.The book is dotted with excerpts from discussions with legal experts, victims, criminologists, offenders, and more.This first chapter leaves you wanting more.It promises a book analyzing the criminal justice system from a human perspective and uncovering all dark sides of criminal justice -not just the dark sides relevant to legal scholars. II. THE AMBITIONAs the title of the manuscript alludes, the first part of the book contains several indictments.It condemns the criminal justice system and points to many issues or legal responses that have caused or exacerbated traumas.For Perrin, traumas are both the roots of 1
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 | 0.014 | 0.030 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.013 | 0.023 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
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".