The Failure to Enforce Criminal Law : Does it Impede the Development of Social Discourse on Important Policy Issues ?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Conservative government led by Stephen Harper showing a particular determination to revamp and toughen Canadaʼs criminal justice system.3 Almost every year, a raft of new crimes has been added to the Criminal Code, 4 sentences for existing crimes have been augmented, 5 and a number of particularly controversial minimum mandatory penalties have been enacted.6 The government has made no secret of the fact that it sees the criminal law as a useful tool to reduce the incidence of undesirable practices across the Canadian landscape.7 Not surprisingly, criticism of this approach has come from a range of diff erent perspectives.Some suggest that the criminal law is ineff ective as a means of controlling behavior.8 Others have reacted negatively to the economic costs of these policies.9 Still others attack the so-called "war on crime" as a challenge to the liberty of citizens through the way it encroaches on the right to act freely where oneʼs act does not cause harm to others.10 All of these are legitimate areas of debate.I wish to raise a diff erent sort of critique about these developments however, one that focuses more upon whether it is a good idea to use the criminal law as a "fi rst response" to address certain types of social problems, especially where public opinion is divided about the legitimacy of the activity being addressed and there are scant resources to enforce the law being Overcriminalization: New Approaches to a Growing Problem, 102 J. Crim.L.
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 | 0.098 | 0.211 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.027 | 0.063 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.032 | 0.022 |
| Open science | 0.006 | 0.016 |
| Research integrity | 0.015 | 0.018 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.001 |
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.
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".