“It Depends on the Outcome”: Prisoners, Grievances, and Perceptions of Justice

• Published date: 01 March 2018
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lasr.12312
• Date: 01 March 2018

“It Depends on the Outcome”: Prisoners,

Grievances, and Perceptions of Justice

Valerie Jenness Kitty Calavita

Social scientists have long investigated the social, cultural, and psychological

forces that shape perceptions of fairness. A vast literature on procedural justice

advances a central finding: the process by which a dispute is played out is cen-

tral to people’s perceptions of fairness and their satisfaction with dispute out-

comes. There is, however,one glaring gap in the literature. In this era of mass

incarceration, studies of how the incarcerated weigh procedural justice versus

substantive justice are rare. This article addresses this gap by drawing on

unique quantitative and qualitative data, including face-to-face interviews with

a random sample of men incarcerated in three California prisons and official

data provided by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation

(CDCR). Our mixed-methods analysis reveals that these prisoners privilege

the actual outcomes of disputes as their barometer of justice. Weargue that the

dominance of substantive outcomes in these men’s perceptions of fairness and

in their dispute satisfaction is grounded in, among other things, the high

stakes of the prison context, an argument that is confirmed by our data. These

findings do not refute the importance of procedural justice, but show the

power of institutional context to structure perceptions of and responses to fair-

ness, one of the most fundamental principles of social life.

Asense of fairness is fundamental to the human condition and

plays a significant role in modern social, economic, and political

This research was funded by the Law and Social Science Program and the Sociology Program,

National Science Foundation (SES-0849731). The authors want to th ank the California Depart-

ment of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) for granting permission to conduct this research

and for providing access to prisoners, CDCR staff, and official documents. Weare especially grate-

ful to the California prisoners who agreed to share with us their experiences and perceptions.

Finally,this article has benefitted from the capable research assistance and helpful comments pro-

vided by Sarah Bach, Ken Cruz, Julie Gerlinger,Lori Sexto n,S arahSmith, Jennifer Sumner, and

Anjuli Verma.L ori Sexton and Sarah Smith in particular played a central role in this research as

project managers during data collection and Sarah Bach, Ken Cruz, and especially Julie Gerlinger

contributed in meaningful ways to the data analyses presentedin this article. We also thank our

colleague, John Hipp, who provided valuable counsel on the sta tistical modeling.

This article was published online on 15 January 2018. Typographical errors were sub-

sequently identified that do not change the interpretation or conclusion of the article. This

notice is included in the online and print versions to indicate that both have been corrected

on 10 February 2018.

Please direct all correspondence to Valerie Jenness, Department of Criminology, Law

and Society, University of California, Irvine, 3305 Social Ecology II, Irvine, CA 92697-

7080; email: jenness@uci.edu.

Law & Society Review, Volume 52, Number 1 (2018)

V

C2018 Law and Society Association. All rights reserved.

41

institutions. Many scholars have examined the psychological, social,

cultural, and political dimensions of fairness and perceptions of

justice. A plethora of empirical findings in the sociolegal field

documents the relationship between people’s perceptions of fair

legal processes and their satisfaction with legal outcomes (Carman

2010; Casper et al. 1988; Hasisi and Weisburd 2011; Hollander-

Blumoff and Tyler 2008, 2011; Jackson et al. 2012; Johnson et al.

2014; Lind and Tyler 1988; Thibaut and Walker 1975; Tyler 1984,

1988, 1990, 1994, 2003; Tyler et al. 2014; Vidmar 1990). Accord-

ing to this scholarship, when people perceive a decision-making

process to be procedurally fair, they are likely to be satisfied with

the outcome even when it does not favor them.

There is, however, a glaring gap in this otherwise extensive and

varied literature. In this era of mass incarceration, studies of how the

incarcerated weigh procedural and substantive justice are rare. We

thus know relatively little about how those who are held in today’s

mammoth prison system perceive the fairness of disputing proce-

dures insideprison walls and of the criminaljustice system in general.

This gap in the literature is particularly glaring given thatprisons are

literally places where “justice” is supposed to be carried out.

This article addresses this gap by drawing on unique data to

unpack the complicated nature of perceptions of fairness and justice

in the prison context. Our primary data consist of confidential, face-

to-face interviews conducted with a random sample of 120 men

incarceratedin three California prisons. The grievance process is the

administrative means that prisoners in the United States may use to

contest the conditions of their confinement. This disputing process

thus providesan empirical lens through which to analyze the relative

importance of procedural and substantive justice to men in prison.

Our findings are at odds with some of the prevailing proce-

dural justice literature: not only are actual grievance outcomes

more important to these prisoners’ satisfaction than their percep-

tions of a fair process are, but in many cases the former drives

the latter. Thus, when a grievance outcome does not go their

way, as is usually the case, these prisoners infer that the process

was unfair (and vice versa). Indeed, in our interviews with them,

these men were often hard-pressed to make any distinction

between an unfavorable outcome and an unfair process.

The arguments we advance to explain these deviations of our

findings from those that dominate the procedural justice field are

contextual in nature. Prison is a hierarchical total institution where

the stakes are high, where autonomy for prisoners is deliberately

curtailed, and where prisoner appellants rarely prevail. We argue

that these high stakes, limited autonomy, and asymmetrical power

relations comprise an environment in which the outcome of a pris-

oner’s grievance can sometimes literally mean life or death. In this

42 Prisoners, Grievances, and Perceptions of Justice

context, the possibility of procedural fairness is either scoffed at by

prisoners or subordinated to the more important goal of, as pris-

oner James Little told us, “getting what you’re supposed to have

coming.” This constellation of characteristics is in some ways unique

to the prison environment, and we do not argue that our findings

are directly generalizable to all settings. Nor do we argue that proce-

dural justice is not important to these prisoners. To the contrary, we

are advancing an empirically driven argument for more context-

specific research into perceptions of justice—research that may

reveal that some aspects of the prison environment are applicable to

other settings, including other total institutions (Goffman 1961).

In previous work (Calavita and Jenness 2015), we describe the

grievance process in detail and document the “pyramid of dis-

putes” as prisoners name, blame, and make claims about problems

in prison, as well as exploring both prisoners’ and staff ’s framing

of grievances (see also Jenness and Calavita 2017). However, that

work does not address the critical issue of how these prisoners per-

ceive fairness and justice in the disputing process, specifically how

they weigh procedural and substantive justice. Our current focus

on prisoners’ perceptions of disputing justice presents a contrast to

findings in much of the procedural justice literature and reveals

the perils of over-generalization. As such, it underscores the pro-

foundly contextual nature of perceptions of justice.

In the next section, we outline the mechanics of the Califor-

nia prisoner grievance process. Following that, we situate our

central analytic concerns in the larger literature on procedural

justice. We then provide an overview of our research site, data,

and methods of analysis. Next, we turn to our findings and anal-

ysis. Throughout our analysis, we highlight the differences

between our findings and those that dominate the procedural

justice literature, and bring to bear a “situated justice” perspec-

tive (Berrey et al. 2012) on those differences. In the conclusion,

we make the case for future research on procedural and substan-

tive justice perceptions in various other venues.

Mechanics of the Prisoner Grievance System

A prisoner grievance system

1

was established in California in

1973 at the height of the prisoner rights movement. Prisoner

rights advocates and others advocated for an appeals system on

the grounds that it would provide a nonviolent avenue for pris-

oners to contest the conditions of their confinement, and would

1

The terms “prisoner grievance system” and “prisoner appeals system” are used

interchangeably here.

Jenness & Calavita 43