Incarcerated Minds: A Comprehensive Analysis on the Origins of the Mental Health Crisis in the Canadian Correctional System
Bibliographic record
Abstract
While various sectors have increased awareness of mental health, the criminal justice system lags behind. Many correctional systems face an alarming prevalence of serious mental illness (SMI), which remains inadequately addressed. This thesis unravels the complex narrative underlying the mental health crisis within corrections. I argue that the crisis of SMI in the Canadian correctional system is fundamentally rooted in the legal understanding of psychiatric illness, thus infringing upon the human rights of persons incarcerated with SMI. First, the stringent criteria of the legal defence of not criminally responsible on account of mental disorder (NCRMD) in s.16(1) serve as a significant barrier for those with SMI who offend. Second, sentencing judges inadequately consider essential mitigating factors such as their mental state and the social contexts contributing to their offence. These limitations result in many individuals with SMI being convicted and admitted to non-psychiatric facilities that fail to adequately prioritze their mental health needs. In Chapters 1 and 2, I contextualize the mental health crisis in corrections and the legal defence of NCRMD. In Chapter 3, I focus on the conviction stage, examining the limitations of s.16(1) and its implications for persons with SMI who offend. In Chapter 4, I focus on the sentencing stage, examining how sentencing judges often fail to adequately consider the mental health of offenders with SMI, particularly among Indigenous and Black persons, due to the conflict of balancing public safety with rehabilitation. Finally, I conclude my thesis by recommending that access to mental health care and social services be significantly increased in both the community and in prisons to tackle the epidemic of SMI in corrections. Ultimately, it is my hope that this thesis will advocate for the human rights and dignity of persons who are incarcerated with psychiatric illnesses, one of the most disadvantaged and marginalized populations in society.
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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 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.009 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".