Solitary Confinement and Prisoners' Human Rights
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Whilst the term ‘solitary confinement’ does not appear in Australian legislation, prisoners in all states and territories can be placed in isolation for periods of time that exceed United Nations standards. Solitary confinement is an embedded strategy used to manage ‘difficult’ prisoners, but legal and psychological research indicates that placing a person in solitary confinement, even for a short period of time, can result in serious psychological harm. Most prisoners will be released, and if they are disturbed and distressed, or so institutionalised that they are unable to reintegrate into society, they may pose an increased risk to members of the community. Courts in Canada, New Zealand, and Europe have condemned the use of solitary confinement on human rights grounds, particularly the right to humane treatment when deprived of liberty, the right to life, and the right to be free from cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. This paper considers how the Human Rights Act 2019 (Qld) could be used to challenge decisions to place prisoners in solitary confinement in Queensland. It is argued that since there are a number of less restrictive alternatives available, placement in solitary confinement may not be a reasonable or justifiable limitation on prisoners’ human rights.
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 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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.000 | 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 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".