Prisoner Aid Beyond Borders: A Transnational History of Prisoner Aid Societies in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States, 1930-1970
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation examines the histories of prisoner aid societies, which were (and continue to be) volunteer-based organizations that support incarcerated people and their families, across Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United States between 1930 and 1970. More specifically, my research compares the policies and practices of societies from Ontario, New York, Victoria, and New Zealand, while also exploring societies’ transnational interactions and sharing of information. The mid-twentieth century saw an increase in the volume and variety of activities that prisoner aid societies in each of the four areas of study conducted both inside and outside of prisons. Treated together, the histories of prisoner aid societies in the key commonwealth nations of Canada, New Zealand, and Australia, and in the close neighbour of the United States offer an opportunity to explore how citizens engaged with justice systems, the role that volunteers played in the rehabilitation of prisoners, and how prisoner aid societies advocated for change in all levels of their respective legal systems. This project is grounded in archival research from each of the four areas of study from national, state, provincial, organizational, and personal record collections.
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 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 | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.030 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".