Inmate Responses to Experiences With Court System Procedural and Distributive Justice

AuthorBradley R. E. Wright,Mike Vuolo,Sadé L. Lindsay
Published date01 December 2019
Date01 December 2019
DOI10.1177/0032885519877401
Subject MatterArticles
/tmp/tmp-17CxZlFICJR4Ot/input 877401TPJXXX10.1177/0032885519877401The Prison JournalVuolo et al.
research-article2019
Article
The Prison Journal
2019, Vol. 99(6) 725 –747
Inmate Responses to
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System Procedural and
Distributive Justice
Mike Vuolo1, Bradley R. E. Wright2,
and Sadé L. Lindsay1
Abstract
According to criminal justice theories, perceptions of procedural and
distributive justice drive opinions on fairness, subsequently affecting
behavior. We contend that such perceptions also affect the emotional
states of incarcerated individuals, identifying court experiences as the focus
of our study. Through fieldwork at a male maximum-security prison, we
find that inmates expressed negative emotional responses associated with
three factors: trial, public defenders, and appeals. Participants described
perceived fairness through personal comparisons to alternative procedures
and outcomes often connected to socioeconomic resources and related
perceptions to emotions such as frustration, regret, resentment, and
hopelessness. We situate our findings within theories of fairness and inmate
adjustment research.
Keywords
distributive justice, procedural justice, inmate adjustment, trial, public
defenders
1The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA
2University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, USA
Corresponding Author:
Mike Vuolo, Department of Sociology, The Ohio State University, 238 Townshend Hall, 1885
Neil Avenue Mall, Columbus, OH 43210, USA.
Email: vuolo.2@osu.edu

726
The Prison Journal 99(6)
Introduction
A long line of criminal justice research has examined the effect of procedural
and distributive justice on perceptions of fairness. Perceptions of fairness
affect individuals’ views on the legitimacy of the criminal justice system,
ultimately influencing compliance (Tyler, 1990/2006). At the same time, per-
ceptions of injustice also result in a host of negative emotions (Markovsky,
1988; Mikula, Scherer, & Athenstaedt, 1998), such that procedural and dis-
tributive justice deserve further scrutiny beyond their effect on compliance or
the general public. This literature has often overlooked those whose experi-
ence with the criminal justice system extends to incarceration. Inmates repre-
sent an important group for understanding the negative emotions that
accompany perceived procedural and distributive justice, as such experience
results in the ultimate loss of liberty through imprisonment. Researchers have
examined extensively the factors that lead to differences in adjustment to the
carceral experience. Here, we contend that the negative emotions associated
with perceptions of unfairness resulting from procedural and distributive jus-
tice within the court system merit consideration alongside other known fac-
tors affecting inmate adjustment to incarceration.
We organize the article as follows. First, we review the literature on percep-
tions of fairness and its consequences, focusing on the negative emotional
responses associated with perceived inequality in procedural and distributive
justice. We introduce three aspects of the court system for which inmates might
perceive unfairness: trials and plea-bargaining, public defenders, and the appeals
process. Next, we describe our ethnographic fieldwork that utilized a combined
inductive and deductive strategy over the course of two summers. This strategy
answers calls to utilize prison ethnographies, given their decline since the begin-
ning of the era of mass incarceration, to understand the incarceration experience
(Wacquant, 2002). We then describe the findings, following Bosworth,
Campbell, Demby, Ferranti, and Santos’s (2005) recommendation that the emo-
tions of inmates take a central role in data collection in prison research. The
results document the negative emotions surrounding perceptions of fairness
within court system experiences. As a final step, following grounded theory
development, we introduce a conceptual model of inmate adjustment and con-
clude with the consequences for prisons, theories of justice, and future research.
Thus, we utilize qualitative research to develop a set of empirically testable
hypotheses for a heretofore understudied factor in the literature.
Perceptions of Fairness and its Consequences
According to criminal justice research, there are two sources of perceptions
of fairness: procedural and distributive justice. From the perspective

Vuolo et al.
727
of procedural justice, individuals define fair procedures based upon an
opportunity to have a voice in the decision-making process, the neutrality
of the decision-maker, being treated with respect, and the trustworthiness
of authority figures (Tyler, 1990/2006). While recognizing the importance
of policing related to perceptions of procedural justice (Tyler, 1990/2006;
Sunshine & Tyler, 2003), including in the case of inmates (Baker et al.,
2014), we concentrate here on fairness perceptions of court system proce-
dures and outcomes. For example, given its constitutional guarantee and
adversarial nature, individuals might consider a trial more “fair” than plea-
bargaining because of the opportunity to be heard. Yet, researchers have
argued that defendants may perceive plea-bargaining as more procedurally
fair, as there is increased opportunity to personally affect the decision rela-
tive to trial (Casper, Tyler, & Fisher, 1988; O’Hear, 2008). Similarly,
inmates may view public defenders who work for the state as less fair rela-
tive to private attorneys due to potential neutrality issues, perhaps viewing
them as “double agents” (Uphoff, 1992). With family support an important
component of emotional health and recovery during and after appeals pro-
cesses (Jenkins, 2014), indigent inmates with few resources and connec-
tions to the outside may feel as though they have no voice in these processes.
Each of these examples highlights a variety of court system components
where perceptions of procedural justice originate.
Perceptions of distributive justice, or those based on the fairness of out-
comes, are also essential in how defendants perceive the court system. For
example, those who identify with the values of a particular subgroup, rather
than those of legal authorities, are more likely to be influenced by perceptions
of the fairness of outcomes as opposed to fair treatment (Tyler, 2000). Serious
criminal offenders may look to outcomes to judge fairness or assess them in
combination with procedural justice (Casper et al., 1988). In addition, unfair
procedures provide an opportunity to attribute an unfavorable outcome to
external causes, while fair procedures do not. Thus, people may react more
negatively to fair procedures after an unfavorable outcome (van den Bos,
Bruins, Wilke, & Dronkert, 1999). For example, even if individuals view the
trial procedure as fair, punishments from trial are typically more severe than
those from plea-bargaining. Thus, an individual who goes to trial has a point
of comparison to an alternative, preferable outcome for the same committed
act, questioning fairness on grounds of distributive justice.
Although extensive, research on fairness has focused primarily on either
attitudes of the general population or those with contact with police and the
courts, often overlooking those funneled through the third step of the criminal
justice system, a sentence to incarceration. The limited body of research on
how inmates experience procedural justice has most often addressed attitudes
of fairness or legitimacy of the institutions of police and courts (Baker et al.,

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The Prison Journal 99(6)
2014) or the correctional setting (Reisig & Mesko, 2009). Rather than concen-
trate on these issues, we take a different approach, using qualitative data to
examine inmate negative emotions as an outcome emerging from perceptions
of court system fairness. Prior attitudes developed before experience with the
legal system and legal authorities shape interpretations of fairness, and further
experiences can alter previously held beliefs about the system (Tyler, 1987).
We contend that the consequences of both procedural and distributive justice
continue to affect the emotional state of incarcerated individuals and that
much of the experience is unique given their imprisoned status.
The three factors mentioned above (i.e., trial, public defenders, appeals) are
each important given their salience for incarcerated populations. Of all felo-
nies, estimates show that a state or county public defender program repre-
sented about 55% of defendants (Farole & Langton, 2010; Langton & Farole,
2010; Perry & Banks, 2011). While plea-bargaining is the norm at about 94%
of felony convictions, going to trial is more common among the subset of
criminal defendants who are imprisoned at about 11% (Rosenmerkel, Durose,
& Farole, 2009). No studies have examined the proportion of prisoners’ seek-
ing appeals and sentence modifications, and even less is known about such
prisoners’ indigent status. In one of the only studies conducted during recent
decades as the U.S. incarceration rate increased, 6% to 12% of Rhode Island
prisoners filed for sentence modifications (Braslow & Cheit, 2011). Thus, in
an era of mass incarceration, a subset of prisoners may judge the fairness of
these various factors on grounds of procedural and...

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