The bail process is both the trial and the punishment: Surveillance and control without the burden of conviction
Bibliographic record
Abstract
During the pre-trial process, accused persons are held in custody or released into the community, often subject to conditions of release. Pre-trial interventions are justified as preventative and in the interests of public safety; however, they are also punitive, with criminal consequences for failing to comply. This study brings together insights from 642 bail appearances observed over 31 days in Ontario, Canada, with official case outcome data. Drawing on Kohler-Hausmann's the notion of marking, procedural hassle, and performance, I argue that the bail process is both the trial and the punishment. Arrest, rather than conviction, commences some or all the sanctioning, eroding the distinction between those who are presumed innocent and those who are found guilty. Without the burden of conviction, the pre-trial process initiates a period of monitoring, assessing the accused persons’ amenability to ascertain if further sanctioning is necessary. With case processing taking an average of 200 days, many accused persons have all the charges withdrawn or receive a sentence of time served, with no further custody imposed. The result is a criminal legal process that routinely punishes those presumed innocent rather than those who have been found guilty.
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 | 0.005 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".