Direct supervision and the epistemic culture of prisons
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this study, we critically examine how provincial correctional officers in Atlantic Canada interpret and disseminate knowledge around direct supervision in the context of a new correctional institution under construction to replace Her [His] Majesty’s Penitentiary—Canada’s oldest prison. Direct supervision is a model intended to facilitate positive, pro-social relationships between correctional staff and incarcerated people, to build therapeutic alliances. Drawing on data from semi-structured interviews, this study analyzes perspectives from 28 correctional officers who generally expressed concerns about direct supervision and, in turn, proposed recommendations for the new facility. We frame these interpretations through the lens of epistemic culture, identifying how prisons can shape knowledge production around direct and indirect supervision. In doing so, we highlight the benefits and limitations of these supervision models, exploring how prison culture informs the ways correctional officers understand, interpret, and ultimately resist direct supervision. We conclude the successful implementation of direct supervision requires a deeper understanding of the apprehensions expressed by correctional officers, comprehensive training regimens, and structural supports such as adequate staffing and mental health services.
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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 | 0.006 | 0.021 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.035 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| 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".