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Record W7128620340 · doi:10.1093/socpro/spaf016

The Struggle over How to Help Incarcerated People: A Field Analysis of the Penal Voluntary Sector

2025· article· en· W7128620340 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

fundA Canadian funder is recorded on the work.
aboutThe title or abstract carries a Canadian signal from the geographic lexicon.
no affNo Canadian affiliation: this work is invisible to an affiliation-only frame.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame, the usual design, would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Bibliographic record

VenueSocial Problems · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicCriminal Justice and Corrections Analysis
Canadian institutionsnot available
FundersSocial Sciences and Humanities Research Council
KeywordsScholarshipVoluntary sectorVisionField (mathematics)Work (physics)Power (physics)Set (abstract data type)Position (finance)

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

ABSTRACT This paper examines the penal voluntary sector (PVS) in Canada, where (un)paid staff act as “first responders” and “last resorts” for the complex, often intractable problems associated with incarceration. Like many other social problems, there are no single or straightforward solutions for the harms related to imprisonment. As such, the PVS’s work is marked by tensions, uncertainties, and competing visions about what should be done. Moreover, scholarship has provided little guidance on how to make sense of diverse and often conflicting ideas about helping incarcerated people. To conceptualize these efforts collectively, this paper draws on online archival research to characterize the PVS as an interstitial field sitting among the voluntary sector, the academic field, and the penal field. Envisioning the PVS in this way offers a new vantage point from which to understand how its actors position themselves as authorities in the struggle over how to help incarcerated people, as well as to understand the ideas, symbols, and resources they rely on to justify their perspectives. By examining these various claims to authority and their interrelationships, this paper reveals the underlying assumptions, logics, and structures of power that set the boundaries for the PVS’s work with incarcerated people.

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.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesScience and technology studies
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Qualitative · Consensus signal: Qualitative
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.486
Threshold uncertainty score0.999

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.005
Science and technology studies0.0020.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.014
GPT teacher head0.295
Teacher spread0.281 · 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