Islamophobia and the Benefits and Challenges for Prison Imams
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Increasingly, religion plays a significant role in the rehabilitation of inmates across the US and Canada. While there is no shortage of literature on the effects of religion within penal institutions, there is a lacuna of scholarship dealing with Islam in carceral spaces. American and Canadian prisons offer unique opportunities to understand the relationship between Muslim chaplains and the prison experience more broadly. Based upon a substantive review of the literature, our conceptual article will examine ongoing challenges with prison chaplaincy within US and Canadian prisons. Broadly, findings suggest that existing structures for religious services for Muslim inmates are neither unified nor systemic, often lacking in funding and resources. Moreover, we find that Muslim chaplains often perceive inequitable treatment by prison authorities due to their historic underrepresentation as well as their religious affiliation. Our discussion will highlight the disparities in penal settings and make recommendations, including but not limited to the need to increase public investment in prison chaplaincy, the need to pay imams-as-chaplains a living wage to help prisoners, and the deradicalization effects of a well-funded and well-trained Muslim chaplaincy, among others.
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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 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".