Recent scholarship suggests disciplinary protocols and incarcerated individuals’ perceptions of procedural justice toward correctional officers may be important in influencing one’s behavior and prison order. This study provides an examination of procedural and distributive justice in prison. We surveyed a stratified random sample of 144 respondents incarcerated in Maine state prisons about their perceptions toward the disciplinary process and corrections officers to assess the relationship between such views and patterns of institutional misconduct. Findings provide partial support for the procedural justice perspective in prison. Normative perceptions (e.g., legitimacy) are positively associated with voluntary deference measures while instrumental perceptions of officer effectiveness in controlling behavior are positively associated with respondent perceived risk. These results supply insight into theory development related to voluntary deference. Similarly, these findings can inform which relationships between officers and respondents may hold the potential to promote rule compliance and prison order.

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Within the context of American jurisprudence, crime, or more precisely criminality, is assigned meaning based on philosophical understandings of human nature. These philosophical understandings of human nature are known as ontological assumptions. While ontological assumptions are inherently teleological, they are essential to the development and advancement of criminological theory. At the most basic level, criminological theory can be taken up as an articulation of a causal mechanism, which employs a set of testable premises. However, before a theory can attempt to explain the etiology of criminality, it must provide an assertion regarding the intrinsic behavioral expectation of human beings – is criminality an intrinsic behavior that must be controlled, or a learned phenomenon? While philosophy provides a medium for dialogue between these polarized assumptions, it fails to satisfy the scientific need for empirical confirmation. The notion of empirical confirmation refers to the second component of theory – testability. Testability evokes another important philosophical construct known as epistemology. In a general sense, epistemology is the philosophical foundation for scientific discourse – the epistemological orientation, which establishes criteria regarding what constitutes credible knowledge. In essence, criminology or the study of criminality is the welding of two philosophical constructs, ontology and epistemology.