Institutional formalism and criminal sentencing on the frontier: evidence from British Columbia’s Jails, 1864–1913
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract In this article, we study historical sentencing outcomes in British Columbia’s civilian criminal justice system during a period of transformative institutional change. We find that average sentences in the civilian system got longer as codification, judicial oversight, and institutional formalism increased. At the same time, sentences also became less dispersed around the mean, less discretionary, and more predictable. Even after controlling for changes in the composition of the prison population, significant increases in sentence length and decreases in sentence dispersion can still be identified, suggesting an important role for judicial decision-making. Using dynamic two-way fixed effect difference-in-differences specifications, we compare sentencing outcomes in the civilian system to outcomes in the institutionally stable military criminal justice system. We find that increases in sentence length, decreases in judicial discretion, and increases in sentence predictability can only be identified among prisoners sentenced in the civilian system after that system moved toward greater institutional formalism. (JEL K14, N21, N41, O43)
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".