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Record W7127205569

It’s Time for a Change: A Proposal to Abolish Solitary Confinement From Canadian Prisons

2025· article· W7127205569 on OpenAlexaboutno aff
Amy Lizbeth J. Rico

Bibliographic record

VenueScholars Commons (Wilfrid Laurier University) · 2025
Typearticle
Language
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicCriminal Justice and Corrections Analysis
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsSolitary confinementCharterPrisonGovernment (linguistics)Human rightsIntervention (counseling)
DOInot available

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Despite Canada’s reputation for being a leader in human rights, its treatment of prisoners requires a closer examination. In particular, prisoner and human rights advocates have widely criticized the use of solitary confinement in Canadian federal and provincial prisons as a form of torture. Solitary confinement imposes excruciating and demeaning conditions on prisoners, jeopardizing their mental and physical welfare. Following court decisions deeming solitary confinement unconstitutional, the federal government replaced the formal use of solitary confinement with structured intervention units. However, these units continue to be a reformulated version of the original practice, sustaining the torturous conditions subjected to inmates. Implications of current practices include a negative impact on inmates' general well-being and a violation of prisoners’ rights under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and international law via the Nelson Mandela Rules. This policy proposal calls for the end of solitary confinement and structured intervention units in all Canadian prisons. While there are some challenges to doing so, benefits to ending the practice include reduced correctional costs, enhanced safety for the general prison population, and increased reintegration success.

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 imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.012
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.028
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: Not applicable
GenreCandidate signal: Commentary · Consensus signal: Commentary
Teacher disagreement score0.105
Threshold uncertainty score0.761

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0120.028
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.002
Bibliometrics0.0020.001
Science and technology studies0.0350.018
Scholarly communication0.0100.004
Open science0.0070.007
Research integrity0.0220.015
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0050.001

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.

Opus teacher head0.020
GPT teacher head0.271
Teacher spread0.251 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreCommentary

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".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

Explore more

Same venueScholars Commons (Wilfrid Laurier University)→Same topicCriminal Justice and Corrections Analysis→French-language works237,207→