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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Valerie Jenness  and
Kitty Calavita
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Abstract

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 central to people's perceptions of fairness and their satisfaction with dispute outcomes. 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. We argue 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 fairness, one of the most fundamental principles of social life.

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Articles
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 52 , Issue 1 , March 2018 , pp. 41 - 72
Copyright
© 2018 Law and Society Association.

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Footnotes

This research was funded by the Law and Social Science Program and the Sociology Program, National Science Foundation (SES-0849731). The authors want to thank the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) for granting permission to conduct this research and for providing access to prisoners, CDCR staff, and official documents. We are especially grateful 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 provided by Sarah Bach, Ken Cruz, Julie Gerlinger, Lori Sexton, Sarah Smith, Jennifer Sumner, and Anjuli Verma. Lori 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 presented in this article. We also thank our colleague, John Hipp, who provided valuable counsel on the statistical modeling.

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

References

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