The Language of Authority: Swearing, Prisonization, and Words Behind the Wall for the Correctional Officer
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Words are integral to human communication across social interactions. In the current study, we examine how the language of swearing is used in Canadian federal prisons to understand how correctional officers (COs) socialize and deliver human service. We seek to add to the body of literature suggesting COs experience the effects of prisonization, as we find nuance in how prison swearing for COs is a unique aspect of their work environment, integral to the norms of prison society, but concurrently, socially and professionally purposeful. We highlight how swearing – often dismissed as deviant – functions as an intentional, context-dependent communication strategy embedded within CO relationships in prison. Findings suggest swearing serves to manage stress, signal belonging, assert authority, and express masculinities, while also producing unintended disruptive effects on Canada’s national correctional officer workforce. We argue that swearing, as a normalized yet misunderstood form of profanity, plays a critical role in rapport building and human service delivery in correctional environments.
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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 | 0.001 |
| 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 | 0.000 | 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 it