‘It's an awful thing, but it's better than being dead’: Exploring the emotional circuitry of failed segregation reforms in Canadian prisons
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Prison authorities around the world are increasingly adopting more politically palatable alternatives to segregation - often referred to as solitary confinement. In 2019, the Canadian government enacted Bill C-83, legally abolishing segregation in federal prisons - at least, on paper - and established Structured Intervention Units (SIUs) as a supposedly less harmful alternative. Critics have problematized the Correctional Service of Canada's implementation of the SIU model as maintaining previous segregation practices under the rhetoric of 'reform'. Building upon these criticisms, this article challenges the common refrain that segregation spaces are prisons within prisons, spaces that are somehow different - extraordinary even - in terms of their material conditions and administration. While segregation or SIUs reflect the most austere and punitive form of isolation, they do not exist apart from the wider carceral environment. Developing the notion of emotional circuitry, we examine formerly incarcerated people's (n = 57) experiences of moving between general population, SIUs, and other segregation-like spaces. We highlight the falsity of distinguishing SIUs as a distinct carceral space, and the importance of understanding its spatial, material, and emotional effects as born from the violence of the broader incarceration experience that no degree of segregation-specific reforms can ameliorate.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".